East Asia has emerged as a dominant base of global manufacturing for the electronics industry, especially for assembly and component manufacturing. In the automobile industry, Japanese assemblers are taking advantage of the regional trade liberalisation programme to streamline production facilities and to facilitate the division of labour in ASEAN countries
so as to benefit from regional scale of production. Keeping this in mind, RCEP and TPP may give more priority to certain service sectors (transportation, telecommunications, ICT, logistic and financial services) that can contribute to or take advantage of the formation of international production and distribution networks.