Regional integration, old and new

Belgeo

Revue belge de géographie 4 | 2020 L'intégration régionale dans le monde

Journal of International Economics, 1995

2007

The EU as a Motor for Regional Integration 13 ample in Sudan, through the specially developed "African Peace Facility". The European Union has made available some €450 million for the deployment of African Union peace troops in Darfur. Economic partnership agreements (EPAs) for regulating trade and economic and political cooperation are currently being negotiated between the EU and the 78 ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) States. In accordance with the Cotonou principle of differentiation and regionalisation, developing countries are currently organised into six regional groups in order to promote both regional integration and social cohesion. There are also similar agreements with regional organisations in Asia and Latin America. For example, we are currently in negotiations with the ASEAN countries regarding partnership and cooperation agreements extending to areas such as migration, human rights and non-proliferation. Dialogues are also being pursued on sectoral matters such as climate change, energy and the information society. The EU supports the efforts of ASEAN to enhance regional cooperation in SouthEast Asia. In Latin America, alongside the very fruitful relations between the EU and the Mercosur countries, there is also enhanced cooperation with the Central American Community and the Andean Community. Only recently we launched negotiations for a comprehensive association agreement with the Central American Community. The objective is to add depth to the political dialogue between both regions, to intensify and improve cooperation in a variety of areas, and to develop further the bi-regional economic links, including in the areas of trade and investment. As is the case with all biregional agreements, this agreement will be negotiated on a 'region-toregion' basis in order to provide more impetus to regional integration in Central America. The European example shows that regional integration is a crucial factor for greater stability, significant progress and sustainable economic development that will benefit the people living in the region. It also contributes to integrating the various regions into the world economy.

Handbook of international economics, 1995

implemented (particularly many among less developed countries). Others vary in the range of product coverage (for example, the inclusion or exclusion of services), in the extent to which they address non-tariff barriers (due, for example, to differing ~Another frequently used term is preferential trading arrangement, sometimes used synonymously with RIA, and sometimes to denote a region with reduced, but not necessarily zero, tariffs.

International Entrepreneurship Review, 2022

The objective of the article is to verify whether the EU can be perceived as a benchmark for further integration of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Participating Countries (RCEP PC) of the Asia-Pacific region. Research Design & Methods: We adopted a quantitative research methodology. It employed cluster analysis through Ward's minimum-variance method to analyze the Euclidean distances of eight GDP-based World Development Indicators and build two synthetic development measures: SMDRCEP and SMDEU. They were used to group countries according to their level of economic advancement. Standard deviation was used to measure the differences in the structure of GDP in both environments (σRCEP and σEU). The research sample was composed of all RCEP PC and European Union Member States (EU MS). The data sets came from the World Bank database. Findings: The integrity level of RCEP PC is lower than that of EU MS; however, the differences are less significant than expected. Nevertheless, the possibility of RCEP reaching the next integration levels in the foreseeable future is limited. Implications & Recommendations: As RCEP PC do not seem to be able to engage in further integration in the near future, RCEP PC policymakers and business entities should focus on keeping the agreement alive in its current form (FTA). We recommend analyzing whether integration in smaller and more homogeneous groups of countries is possible and desirable. Another factor worth further research is whether the inadequate size of the Chinese economy within the agreement has a pro-or anti-integrational influence on RCEP. Contribution & Value Added: Our research provides an actual insight into the development possibilities of the 'youngest' regional integration agreement, the RCEP, based on the experiences related to the integration of the most advanced regional integration agreement, the EU.

Over the last two decades of the world economy development, both the process of global/multilateral trade liberalization and the regional economic integration have intensified in parallel. Contemporary economists are unanimous in asserting a strong interdependence between the two processes. The voices are much less in accord as to the normative evaluation of this correlation. This paper will offer a detailed analysis of both the 'pessimist' and the 'optimist' arguments. The analysis will try to clarify whether the regional trading arrangements obstruct or facilitate the process of multilateral trade liberalization. The analysis takes heed to distinguish between earlier waves of regionalism in the world economy and the latest wave, which support the argument that new regionalism is relatively "benign" to outsiders and the multilateral trading system as the whole. Since the global trade liberalization is led primarily through the World Trade Organization (WTO), the analysis is particularly sensitive to the norms and principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), i.e. the part played by the WTO as a key factor in establishing what influence the regional integration exerts upon the process of multilateral trade liberalization.

Regional trade integration, which proliferation has been evident since the 90ties of the twentieth century, lost its historical role in supporting the world trade liberalization and became a crucial obstacle to it. This element, being incorporated as a legal into multilateral trading system, achieved new features, and represent for governments a method how to promote an expansion of their progressive industry, how to protect it from third countries competition at an expanded territory and how to maintain at the same their markets closed for a competition to their sensitive and strategic industry. The preferences for the concept of protectionism in regional trade agreements is furthermore supported by a deep interference of multilateral trading system into domestic policies of the WTO members, which represents for governments an undesirable challenge through the complex approach. The "new protectionism" became also a cause of the lack of progress in the current WTO negotiat...