THE trade war brewing between the world's two biggest economies, the United States and Japan, has once more focused attention on trade barriers and tariff walls.
The global trend in recent years has been towards a multilateral-trading system based on economic co-operation and the free and open exchange of goods and services.
Yet the highway leading to unencumbered international trade, embodied by the birth of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on January 1 this year, is littered with burnt-out theories of the merits of managed and protective trade barriers.
Testimony to the benefits of free trade is the dynamic growth of the Asia-Pacific region, which owes as much to the foresight and enterprise of its people as it does to treaties of regional economic and trade co-operation.
In its recently released annual report, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) notes that economic interdependence among the Asia-Pacific developing countries has increased steadily, together with their efforts for greater regional co-operation for development.
The Manila-based institution says that in recent years, a new concept of 'open regionalism' has emerged. Countries now seek 'not only to reduce intra-regional barriers to economic interaction, but also to lower external barriers for economies which are not part of the co-operation arrangement'.
Trade and economic groupings which now denote the Asia-Pacific region range from small sub-regional growth triangles to larger regional initiatives, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum.
