2026-10-15T02:17:23Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.40700 2026-06-23T11:08:54Z

2026-06-23 Do Investment Provisions in Regional Agreements Foster Growth? A Quasi-experimental Analysis of the ASEAN–Japan Partnership doi:10.57760/sciencedb.40700 en Regional economic agreements have increasingly shifted from tariff liberalization to investment-related institutional coordination, yet the macroeconomic effects of these provisions remain insufficiently examined. This issue is especially relevant for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has remained resilient amid weakening global foreign direct investment flows and in which Japan has long played a central role in regional production networks. This study treats the implementation of the ASEAN–Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (AJCEP) as a quasi-natural institutional shock and examines whether investment-related regional cooperation promotes economic growth. Using annual panel data for nine Asia-Pacific economies from 2000 to 2023, the study applies a difference-in-differences (DID) framework with country and year fixed effects. The results show that AJCEP significantly increased gross domestic product growth in treated ASEAN economies relative to the control group. This finding remains robust after event-study tests, country-specific policy timing checks, country-clustered and wild-cluster bootstrap inference, controls for competing regional agreements, adjustments for the global financial crisis, propensity score matching DID estimation, placebo tests, and alternative sample composition checks. Auxiliary channel evidence further suggests that AJCEP is associated with higher foreign direct investment inflows, stronger production-network trade linkages, and improved regulatory quality. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the growth effect is not clearly differentiated by income level, but remains positive across both interventionist industrial-policy and more market-oriented environments. These findings suggest that investment-related regional agreements foster growth more effectively when supported by credible domestic implementation, regulatory alignment, transparent investment procedures, institutional capacity building, and production-network upgrading. ASEAN–Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership (AJCEP); Investment Policy; Economic Growth; Difference-in-Differences (DID); Regional Economic Integration Shasha Wu Yang Liu RESTRICTED dataset Science Data Bank