The Asian financial crisis was not a unique event; it had roots in other developments such as the Mexican financial crisis of 1994 and the world debt crisis of the 1980s. It has been feared that a world crisis could envelope all economies at once, but the United States, the European Union, and China have so far avoided crisis situations although they could experience slower expansion and some serious economic im-balances. They feel the effects of the East Asian crisis. Many diverse reasons are responsible for the Asian crisis, and no single issue carries all the blame. Policies for reform must recognize this fact and deal with institutional defects, adequate regulation of newly liberalized markets, speculative practices, and exchange rate mechanisms. In particular, the attempts to link currencies to the US dollar were ill-advised, and more flexible patterns should be put in place for the future. Broadly speaking, crisis-ridden countries should learn from past situations that have generated unstable economic con-ditions and adopt policies that prevent their recurrence or avoid them by other means.

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Two effects, static as well as dynamic, are expected as merits of establishing regional economic integration (REI) such as EU, NAFTA and APEC. The Viner's trade creation versus trade diversion criteria evaluate only static effects of abolishing intraregional tariffs or shallow integration which are estimated to be limited and smaller than global trade liberalization (Section 2).
In contrast, a deeper integration opens larger market among REI members, promotes their reform in production method and organization especially due to freer movements of foreign direct investment, and, thus, brings about big dynamic gains of greater social economies of scale (Section 3).
The Akamatsu/Kojima model of flying geese patterns of development well explains the successful growth of post-war Japanese economy and its regional spread to East Asian countries (Section 4).
The paper reaches a conclusion (Section 5) that a shallow integration worldwide is possible to be established by GATT/WTO whereas a deeper integration is to be promoted to cultivate greater dynamic gains through REI.

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The interaction of technological innovation and international trade is one of the most interesting issues to both theoretical and empirical economists. In the area of macroeconomics, the recent development of endogenous growth theory, in which technological innovation is a key-element, is closely related to international trade. The purpose of this paper is to survey the recent theoretical and empirical literature of technological innovation, technology transfer and international trade. After the introduction, the effect of exogenous technological innovation on the pattern of international trade is discussed in the second section. In the third section, how the stock of technological knowledge generated through “learning by doing” changes the comparative advantage is examined. In the fourth section, the paper introduces the theoretical argument on how the technological knowledge created by R&D in the North and transferred to the South accelerates the economic growth of both sides. The last section surveys the recent literature of empirical studies of innovation and trade.

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In this paper we develop a three-country model of international trade with imperfectly competitive good, which consists of two developed countries and one developing country. We analyze comprehensively the effects of a tariff change on the supplies of imperfect competitive good and on the welfare of each country in the most general framework, i. e., demand functions as well as cost functions are non-linear. One of the important results of the analyses is that a reduction in a developed country's tariff can increase the world welfare as a whole in the case of decreasing marginal cost.

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On January 1998, the U.S. and Japan agreed upon a new bilateral civil aviation framework. This study conducts a comparative analysis of the pre-1998 and the new U.S.-Japan civil aviation frameworks and examines to what extent government regulations have been removed. Four major research findings are drawn. First, in 1980's, the Japanese Ministry of Transport (MOT) partially enforced route and capacity regulations by freezing the original 1952 U.S.-Japan Aviation Treaty. Subsequently, the two-tier framework, more protective than the Treaty, was established, leading to inequality in competitive conditions among market participants. Second, the framework was not restrictive enough to control the U.S.-Japan market and protect Japanese carriers. Third, the new framework is far more liberal and transparent than the old framework or the current U.S.-U.K. and U.S.France ones. It is practically close to a free trade, i. e., open skies, framework. Fourth, MOT continues to insist on regulating international aviation services, although it embarked on substantial liberalization of the U.S.Japan framework.

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