China and the Philippines agreed on Friday to strengthen trade and economic cooperation between the two countries after the conclusion of a high-level meeting. [...] "China would like to work with the Philippines to deepen China-ASEAN relations, properly handle South China Sea issue, jointly safeguard stability in the South China Sea and maintain the good momentum of development in China-ASEAN relations," Wang Yang said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper departed Sunday for South Korea, where he is widely expected to complete another long round of free-trade negotiations that his critics were denouncing as secretive and potentially bad for Canadian workers. It wasn’t known whether Harper planned to sign the final text of a free-trade deal with South Korea — a laborious, decade-long, on-again, off-again process — or was simply going to announce an agreement-in-principle in a staged photo-op.

On Feb. 19, President Obama heads to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the North American Leaders' Summit. The three leaders will undoubtedly look back at the last 20 years, recognizing the mostly positive changes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other cross-border ties have brought to the three nations.

Over the last two decades, Brazil’s trade policy has centered on two main negotiations. At the regional level, Brasília has spent much of its time and effort trying to lay the groundwork for a common economic space in the Southern Cone of South America. Since 1991, Mercosur, the Common Market of the South, has been the centerpiece of that strategy.

Pass through the gates of the Bombardier plant in Querétaro and you leave the Mexico of potholed roads and blaring horns behind: welcome to a strangely serene place called North America. In the car park neat lines of vehicles all face the same way—almost unthinkable elsewhere in Mexico.

After declaring the nation “open for business,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has set a target of achieving free trade deals with China, Japan and South Korea within just 12 months. Can the recently elected leader succeed where his predecessors failed? Having stated at the APEC summit in Bali that he wished to swiftly conclude eight years of negotiations with China, Abbott told reporters at last week’s East Asian Summit in Brunei that he was adding the nation’s second and third-biggest trading partners to the target list.