Impact of the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) on Intra-ASEAN Trade

Published by Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)

As mandated in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) 2025 Blueprint, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is undertaking a Midterm Review of the Blueprint to take stock of achievements and identify remaining gaps and issues to be addressed in realising the AEC by 2025. At this mid-point, an important issue is an assessment of how implementation of the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) has performed, especially in terms of its impact on trade flows. ATIGA is the successor to the agreement on the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) Scheme of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and entered into force in 2010. The ATIGA consolidates and streamlines the provisions in the CEPT Agreement and other relevant ASEAN agreements, and broadens its scope. The ATIGA goes beyond tariff reductions and contains specific provisions on rules of origin (ROO), non-tariff measures (NTMs), trade facilitation, and sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. It is the main instrument in realising the goal
of establishing a single market and production base in ASEAN, a key pillar of the AEC.
The Coordinating Committee on the Implementation of ATIGA (CCA) assists the Senior Economic Officials’ Meeting (SEOM) and the AFTA Council in ensuring the effective implementation of the ATIGA. The CCA oversees and monitors the implementation of ATIGA, particularly on tariff liberalisation commitments, ROO, NTMs and trade facilitation, and other activities related to the realisation of free flow of goods in the AEC.

In 2019, the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) was tasked by the CCA to conduct a quantitative assessment of the impact of ATIGA on intra-ASEAN trade. This report presents results of that analysis. This chapter integrates and summarises the key issues, themes, and findings of the report. The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows. Chapter 2 provides an outline of the report, with a brief overview of each of the chapters. The key results of the quantitative analysis, the main output of the report, are presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 considers how these results should be interpreted in the context of ASEAN. It looks more closely at the underlying factors that might be driving the results, and what this means for the assessment of the performance of ATIGA. In light of this, it looks to the way forward, with regard to changes that need to be implemented to ensure that ATIGA realises its objectives.