Formats for Multilateral and Bilateral Economic Cooperation in Northeast Asia

The review studies the formats of bilateral and multilateral economic cooperation between the countries of Northeast Asia (NEA). The subregion includes six states, accounting for 23.3% of the world’s population, 25.7% of global GDP, and 22.1% of global merchandise exports. Despite significant potential, NEA countries do not have six-party agreements on trade, investment, customs, or migration cooperation, preferring projects with a wider range of participants. There are also no such agreements on a trilateral basis between the countries of the Big Three–China, Japan, and South Korea—which act as the “locomotive” of NEA. These areas of cooperation are developing mainly on a bilateral basis. The overwhelming majority of agreements on free trade areas signed by the NEA countries fall on non-regional partners. At the same time, North Korea is characterized by a complete absence of agreements, Russia has no agreements with partners in the subregion, and Mongolia, South Korea, China, and Japan have one agreement within the NEA framework. The process of negotiating and implementing agreements (both multilateral and bilateral) is greatly complicated by periodic exacerbation of Chinese-Japanese and Korean-Japanese relations, as well as by North Korean nuclear weapons tests.