Trade and economic arrangements between India and South East Asia in the context of regional construction and globalisation Henry, Laurence

The economic and trade relations between India, on one hand, and South-East Asia, on the other hand, are shaped by numerous agreements and groupings, which may become formal international Organisations in the future. They are indeed based not only on comprehensive economic agreements or free trade agreements between India and ASEAN or at the bilateral level with Thailand and Singapore in particular, but also on the BIMST-EC and MGC groupings. After having been mainly based on informality and ad-hoc arrangements, they are today more institutionalized and founded on a more formal corpus of law. This paper first presents those regional initiatives, and how they are governed and managed. Then, it makes the statement that they are overlapping but, at the same time, they are also influenced by the same philosophy of trade and economic liberalization and influenced by the WTO system, in terms of law, institutions and dispute settlement. They are also the result of a tension between the multilateral, regional and bilateral levels and they aim to protect different interests at different levels. The paper finally discusses the possible influence of these arrangements between India and South-East Asia on the future organisation of the regional economic and trade integration of East-Asia.