Share Cambodia, ASEAN likely to teeter off balance with RCEP Thu, 1 April 2021 Four months after RCEP was signed, a study surfaces, with gloomy trade data, portending a shaky future for the Kingdom and ASEAN as a whole Prominent economist and trade policy scholar Jagdish Bhagwati once likened free trade agreements (FTAs) to “termites” that “eat away” at multilateral trading systems “relentlessly and progressively”. His remark, which described the title of his 2008 book Termites in the Trading System – How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade, was intuitive in that he talked about how FTAs are “erroneously” pursued by governments in the hope of scoring a free trade agenda.