This conference will consist of back-to-back sessions in which presenters and panelists will analyze trade and investment trends in East Asia and discuss the evolution of East Asian economic institutions, including APEC, the ASEAN Plus 3 process, and the East Asian Summit. These discussions will be based upon two chapters from the forthcoming book The Eagle and the Dragon: The United States, China and the Rise of East Asian Regionalism (AEI Press, 2007) by Claude Barfield and Andrei Zlate.

The first session will focus on whether East Asia is becoming a regional trading bloc, and the implications of recent trends in trade and investment--particularly the rise of the production-sharing model in which the production process is segmented among different nations. The second session will analyze and assess the likelihood of the creation of region-wide institutions to deal with economic and political issues among member states. A central issue to be discussed will be the future of competing visions for East Asian regionalism: the expansive, trans-Pacific vision embodied in APEC, or the more exclusive intra–East Asian vision embodied in the ASEAN Plus 3 process.