Economic Regionalism

12 Key excerpts on "Economic Regionalism"

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  eBook - ePub

  New Critical Writings in Political Sociology

  Volume Three: Globalization and Contemporary Challenges to the Nation-State

  • Alan Scott, Anna Marie Smith(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Because regions and their boundaries change when states leave or join them and when power relations within and between them are significantly redefined, the new regionalism argues that regional change occurs when critical political and territorial saliencies are reframed by the participating states. In political regionalism, key issues concern the stability of the region, the security of its members, its contribution to the current global order, and the relationship of the member states to the global system (see also Hurrell and Fawcett 1995). In effect, regionalization is a dynamic and flexible process in which change is continual rather than happening by distinct leaps and bounds; the emergence of a shared identity is necessarily an evolutionary process.

  Economic Regions

  Economic regionalization appears to depend on both political decisions at the regional level and the locational decisions made by firms. In effect, regions are viewed as an appropriate unit in which to organize governance and stimulate political participation. But often, as in the European Union, regional governance has remained weak. In fact, its regional dimension has been more manifest in the rise of economic pivot regions and of capital- and technology-intensive cities that support local development. There is evidence to suggest that, at least in Europe, differences in regional growth rates have depended on a combination of local conditions and their linkages to the world economy (Le Gales and Lequesne 1998; Rodriguez-Pose 1998; Braunerhjelm et al. 2000; Newman 2000). Neither the state nor regional government alone can assure regional success that is based on the interrelationship among local resources, transnational capital, and public-private interactions. Loose policy initiatives and regional networks cannot save a regional project if its market incentives are inadequate (Cowling and Sugden 1999; Koch and Fuchs 2000).

  Regional specialization and growth are due both to expanding trade and investment as well as endogenous factors. Decreasing transaction costs play a role in the relocation of production within and between countries. The result is a center-periphery division that changes as development spurts integrate new regions into the center. Due to backward and forward linkages, production tends to agglomerate to areas where there is already similar production, irrespective of the intensity of trade relations (Fujita, Krugman, and Venables 1999; Venables 1999).

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  Multinationals and European Integration

  Trade, Investment and Regional Development

  • Nicholas A. Phelps(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 The Political Economy of European Integration Regionalism At once the EU stands as the most potent symbol of, and the major force behind, the contemporary regionalisation of trade. The EU’s sphere of influence in world trade has steadily grown to effectively undermine the purpose of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and multilateralism. Through both a widening (from the original 6 to the current 15) and deepening, the EU has become the major trade bloc in the world economy; one which has become powerful enough to frustrate the GATT under the leadership of the US. Furthermore, the EU’s influence on world trade does not end there, it extends through its trade relations with much of the rest of the world. Regional economic integration can be considered both as a state of affairs and as a process (Balassa, 1962, cited in Chisholm, 1995). Integration as a state of affairs can be conceived in terms of several stages of integration. There are four main stages of economic integration which are usually identified – the free trade area, the customs union, the common market and the economic union – though to this list we can add an initial and more general category of the regional trade bloc. The term trade bloc is general enough to encapsulate any of the four formalised states of economic integration but also allows one to consider groupings of countries which are not integrated by way of formalised arrangements but rather by de facto trade and investment patterns. Four general conditions make for a coherent trade bloc; similar levels of per capita GNP, geographic proximity, similar or compatible trading regimes, and political commitment to regional organisation (Schott, 1991: 2). As a first stage of regional economic integration we may have a collection of countries for which there are no common formal arrangements as in a free trade area but which satisfy the conditions above

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  Mega-regionalism and Great Power Geo-economic Competition

  • Xianbai Ji(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Geopolitical considerations that have historically animated the emergence of regionalism are in close connection with the broader relationship between trade liberalisation and political integration. Depending on the sequencing of the two oft-interrelated undertakings, FTA plays different roles. FTA and the associated economic process can activate regional integration in a political sense. 8 According to this neo-functionalist view, the spill-over effects of trade integration create an enabling socio-economic and policy environment that makes the need for deeper integration on political and institutional matters appealing and inescapable (WTO 2011). The most discussed case in this regard is the EU (Lindberg 1963). The establishment of the Pacific Alliance (PA) in 2011 linking together Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru (Villarreal 2016, Herreros 2016) is yet another example. The objective of the PA goes beyond building an enlarged local market to projecting the members’ joint strengths to the Pacific Asia. The four PA countries move expeditiously along a sliding scale from economics to politics, towards the goal of deep integration. They have agreed to eliminate nearly all tariffs by 2020, coordinate trade and investment promotion activities overseas, scrap intra-PA tourist visa requirements for each other’s citizens, create the Latin American Integrated Market and pool diplomatic resources by opening up joint embassies in countries like Vietnam (Nolte 2016). Conversely, regionalism can be contemplated to complement or renew a pre-existing “high-politics” process wherein the importance of “low-politics” issues like trade liberalisation had previously been downplayed for one reason or another

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  Regionalism in Hard Times

  Competitive and post-liberal trends in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas

  • Mario Telò(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The number, scope, and influence of these associations and regimes has increased considerably since the early 1980s, in parallel with globalization. 2 (d) A customs union with a common trade policy : these include common external tariff and foreign economic policy (for example, MERCOSUR), the EU, and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), including five members of (SADC). The definition of ‘strategic regionalism’, that is competing for defending regional geoeconomic interests and asserting distinctive socio-economic and learning models, could also be used to cope with such a phenomenon. (e) We understand economic regional integration to be a common market and an economic union, including not only cooperation, but also coordination of national macroeconomic policies and sometimes currencies, through various intergovernmental and, rarely, supranational institutions. (f) The new regionalist approach emphasizes that regions are not only entities of social interaction, but also of policymaking and polity construction. We don’t understand a ‘regional polity’ to be a regional federal State, but various forms/regimes of political cooperation (up to gradually coordinating national policies in sensitive fields) and an institutional capacity to minimize internal asymmetries and maximize external influence. 3 Furthermore, what matters as the sociopolitical construction or ‘cognitive regionalism’ are communitarian feelings of shared identity. Finally, there is not an evolutionary sequence: all the five types of cooperation above do not need to be included within this deeper step. Using the historical and theoretical framework provided by the chapter one, we will focus on empirical and comparative questions

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  Exploring the New South American Regionalism (NSAR)

  • Ernesto Vivares(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Three elements can be identified as the central weaknesses of neoliberal institutionalism. The first is the idea that regionalism is defined by its level of institutionalization subordinated to the dynamic of trade and based on the major regional experiences (EU, NAFTA, APEC). Secondly, there exits the identification of regionalism as a state-led project of integration which confines the concept of regionalism and its research to state and governmental agency, leaving out not only strategic areas of analysis but also conflict and well-being. Finally, there is the reduction of regionalism to a trade phenomenon where institutions only play a role in creating incentives and constraints to given processes (Söderbaum, 2005).

  The third most influential and dominant school of thinking on regionalism in South America is the body of economic theories called regional economic integration or liberal regional economic integration. This set of economic integration approaches generally cement the relation between—and are the basis of—the economic assumptions upon which neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism are founded. According to these approaches, regional integration proceeds through a sequence of trade and economic agreements that define a model of linear evolution in order to reach complete economic integration. According to the Balassa model (1961), the progression from preferential trade areas to free trade areas, with customs unions, common markets, monetary unions, and ending up with a complete economic area, generally is the basis of most of the research on regionalism in regional development banks (Estevadeordal and Suominen, 2007). These theories are concerned principally with the welfare effects as the result of trade creation, diversion, and integration (Cable and Henderson, 1994), although they present rigid limitations to integrally explain development given their disciplinary boundaries.

  Liberal regional economic integration approaches are usually used in combination with actor-oriented theories, with the aim of generating models to predict and enhance paths of interstate cooperation (Estevadeordal and Suominen, 2007: 4). In this sense, there are two different lines of economic integration research. The first line of study concentrates on whether the impact of Economic Regionalism contributes to the world trading system. The second group, also created to explain economic integration in Europe, distances itself from orthodox economics by focusing more on investment, employment, infrastructure, and structural transformations, as well as market and government failures (Robson, 1993).

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  Northeast Asian Regionalism

  Lessons from the European Experience

  • Christopher M. Dent, David W. F. Huang(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Third, the chapter discusses regional co-operation in the Asia-Pacific region from the perspective of economic regionalization and evaluates of the differences between Europe and Asia-Pacific in terms of theoretical basis and developmental experience. Finally Northeast Asia subregionalism is discussed and the problems and prospects for promoting more integration in this area is evaluated.

  2.  Regionalism and Regional Integration in the Global Political Economy (i) Theoretical Discourses

  Since the late 1980s a resurgence of regionalism has emerged in the world economy and politics. Some regard it as a positive and permanent characteristic of the post-Cold War international order. Others are more skeptical and believe that regionalism, which flourished in the 1960s, will have a limited application and shelf life.6 Most theoretical analysis of contemporary regionalism focuses on the impact of regional interdependence and highlights the importance of domestic factors. There are various reasons given to explain the rise of regionalism in relation to developments in the international political economy, for example, the end of the Cold War and the erosion of the Cold War alliance system; the impact of increasing economic integration and globalization; changed attitudes towards economic development in most parts of the developing world and the impact of democracy and democratization. Most academic discussion of regionalism focuses on analysing a particular regionalist arrangement, be it the EU, NAFTA, or ASEAN and continuing discussions within the Asia-Pacific region over new economic and security agreements like APEC, Pacific Economic Co-operation Council (PECC), and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). These discussions emphasize the trends of regional trading blocs on the one hand and co-operation and integration on the subregional level on the other hand.7

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  The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy

  • Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola, Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola, Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Part VII Regional Integration and Africa Political Economy Passage contains an image

  © The Author(s) 2020

  S. O. Oloruntoba, T. Falola (eds.)

  The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy Palgrave Handbooks in IPE https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38922-2_52

  Begin Abstract

  52. The Languages and Grammar of Regionalism

  Daniel C. Bach

  1   

  (1) Department of International Relations, Sciences Po Bordeaux, Centre Emile Durkheim, Pessac, France

   

    Daniel C. Bach

  Email: [email protected]

  End Abstract

  The renaissance of regionalism in the 1990s has drawn attention to issues and processes that were previously ignored or deemed of marginal significance. This chapter discusses how this trend has ushered deep changes in the conceptualization of the dynamics at play across the African continent and the Global South in general. Theories of regional integration were until then primarily concerned with the experience of the European Union (EU ). The decisive shift came with the acknowledgment of the global economic and geostrategic imprint of the Asia-Pacific region, a trend that has kept consolidating since then, along with the rise of China and India as key players within the global economy. Equally important, perhaps, fresh attention paid to the “world of regions” (Katzenstein 2005

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  A Brief History of the Future

  The United States In A Changing World Order

  • Allan E. Goodman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Regions tend to grow—and increase demands for goods and services—far faster than individual countries. The resources and capital people exchange within the region tend to be used very efficiently: More sellers can find more buyers, and individual nations are free to specialize in the production of profitable goods and services and to purchase what they do not have and what things they need from regional producers. In the past, many nations were forced to diversify production or to tap natural resources in order to ensure economic independence and national security. As the process evolvesand more goods and services are exchanged, more income is created to allow people to improve their lives and develop tastes for additional goods and services produced outside the region. As this occurs, theregion attracts extra-regional investment, and this creates jobs and even more income.

  The bottom line is that through regional integration—or at least through the creation of common market arrangements—the majority of the people will benefit and trade will increase as more buyers begin to search for more sellers and, due to population growth, there are more and more customers, even for those commodities now in surplus. Regionalization also promotes democratization and political stability. It tends to create an atmosphere and an impetus for countries to respect basic human rights across all types of systems; it also allows goods, capital, and people to move freely and puts subtle economic and social pressure on individual countries to reduce illegal or unscheduled political actions and changes that jeopardize the continued attraction of extra-regional resources and direct investment. Never in history has a regional market succeeded by closing itself off to the rest of the world.

  Present Obstacles

  Of course, numerous past attempts at regional integration have not been successful. However, the mostencouraginglessonderived from these failures is that virtually every study points to the lack of political will on the part of those who had the chance to participate in these attempts and not to the impracticability of such arrangements for enhancing economic growth and trade. No one has really demonstrated that integration makes poor economic sense, only that many leaders thus far have lacked the vision and courage to surmount the initial obstacles to itscreation. Consequently, I think it isat least possible to foresee a period in which the appeal of political incentives for integration will grow at both the mass and elite levels and that this will overcome the resistance that has derailed past efforts.

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  Regional Powers and Regional Orders

  • Nadine Godehardt, Dirk Nabers(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Subacchi 2008 ).
• What contribution can the economics of regional powers make to regional powers theory?
My contribution will consider the discourse on the economics of regional powers and, starting from here, will conceptually investigate the above questions in order to enhance and ultimately empirically test the concept of regional powers. In this contribution, I do not refer to the concepts of the BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), ‘rising powers’ or ‘emerging powers’ (Wilson and Purushothaman 2003 ; Nolte 2006 ). All those studies which do so already address the shifting of economic and political power relations.
In Section 3, I provide an overview of the economic discourses on the role of regional powers’ influence on countries in the region. In Section 4, I develop a proposal for a concept of the economics of regional powers. This discussion is based on the review and evaluation of data. Section 4 presents the results.

Economic discourse on the role of regional powers' influence on countries in the region

As early as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were economic works on the dominance of developed nation- states, which shaped the development of less developed states, such as Friedrich List’s theory on British supremacy in Europe and in the world (List 1959 ). Leadership in the economic process of modern capitalism has also been analysed by Alois Schumpeter. He focuses on technological revolutions and their diffusion. Entrepreneurs bring together a bundle of incremental and fundamental innovations, implement new combinations and trigger a ‘creative destruction’ that generates growth. Innovation encompasses the following: (1) the creation of a new good or new quality of good, (2) the creation of a new method of production, (3) the opening of a new market, (4) the capture of a new source of supply and (5) a new organization of industry (for example, the creation or destruction of a monopoly). Countries with the will to win dominate over those without an innovative dynamic. As a result of the disruptions, transitions from ‘the respective centre of gravity to another’ occur (Schumpeter 1987: 99 ). Due to this outcompeting of the old powers, new combinations of production factors, which require financing with loans, prevail; authority or credit, according to Schumpeter’s assessment, are the means, together with the will to win and the joy of creating, through which ‘leadership’ comes into being (Schumpeter 1987: 127 and 138