Australia-Thailand Free Trade Agreement: A Critical View

Australia and Thailand signed a bilateral free trade agreement on 6 July 2004. Christopher Findlay, an Australian economist, was rather sceptical about the significance of this FTA. He said, according to ABC's Australia-Thailand Free Trade Agreement: a turning point?, that "when you start looking through the 286 pages on the rules of origin, when you start trying to study what the safe-guard measures that have been put in place – that is, the right to cut back on the tariff reductions – and when you look at the phasing periods, some of which run out to 2020, then there's a fair bit of homework to do on what it really means for us", and that "it's not clear to me that this is a good track to regional integration ... I'd see it as clogging up the process and diverting people's attention from the main game".