| الملخص: | ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) was established in 1992 with the main objective of
increasing intra-ASEAN trade. Under AFTA, tariff reduction and elimination were
introduced through the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) and ASEAN
Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA). As a direct impact of AFTA, the study focuses on
the measurement of utilization of preferential tariffs under AFTA and the impact of
intra-regional trade from the angle of intra-industry trade and revealed comparative
advantage for the three most sensitive industries in ASEAN. A Panel Regression Model
is then developed to investigate the determinants of preferential tariff utilization, intraindustry
trade and revealed comparative advantage for the three industries.
The study reveals for the first time, the utilization rate (UR) of AFTA for Malaysia
using actual transaction level data at HS2 level for year 2007 to 2011. The UR showed
that in general, AFTA only benefitted Malaysia’s export to a very low degree and it also
implies that AFTA has not directly benefitted Malaysia’s export to ASEAN in total,
recording only an average UR of 13.7% that represents only 3.4% of Malaysia’s total
exports to the world. The concentration of products with high UR were mostly for lower
value products and high value products on the other hand mostly do not benefit from
AFTA due to competing Most Favoured Nation (MFN) tariffs.
The Intra Industry Trade (IIT) and Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) indexes
examined the bilateral trade pairs of ASEAN-5 countries with a total of 1680
observations for agriculture, automotive and textile industries. The agriculture industry
showed trade creation effect for products such as ground nuts, soy bean, oil seeds,
coffee and tea and trade diversion effect due to high degree of competition between
Thailand and Vietnam for rice. The automotive industry showed a country centric result
where trade creation effect was focused between Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines,
whereas Malaysia and Vietnam in most cases were isolated from the significant pairs of countries for RCA and IIT. The textile industry in general showed two types of results.
The first is on the competitiveness of ASEAN countries among each other for low
processed or raw products and secondly, no competition between ASEAN countries for
finished products such as clothing, apparel and others, which represent higher export
values.
Finally, by using the Hausman-Taylor (HT) estimation, determinants of preferential
tariff utilization (PTU), RCA and IIT for agriculture, automotive and textile industries
were investigated. The study found that the overall margin of preference and export
values did not significantly affect the utilization rate of AFTA for the three industries.
However, the impact of AFTA seems to be more positive in providing comparative
advantage to Malaysia in the three industries. Exports, particularly in the textile
industry, have a strong positive correlation with RCA and PTU. Also, the RCA showed
positive relationship with exports for the textile and agriculture industries. In respect to
IIT, this study showed that a strong relationship between the margin of preference and
IIT for the agriculture sector. The IIT also corresponded positively with the increase in
export and utilization rates in the textile industry.
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