Regional Integration

Regional integration is the process by which two or more nation-states agree to co-operate and work closely together to achieve peace, stability and wealth. An arrangement for enhancing cooperation through regional rules and institutions entered into by states of the same region.

Usually integration involves one or more written agreements that describe the areas of cooperation in detail, as well as some coordinating bodies representing the countries involved.

Regional integration could have as its objective political or economic goals or in some cases, a business initiative aimed at broader security and commercial purposes. Regional integration could have an intergovernmental or supranational organization.

This co-operation usually begins with economic integration and as it continues, comes to include political integration. We can describe integration as a scale, with 0 representing no integration at all between two or more countries. Ten would represent complete integration between two or more countries. This means that the integrating states would actually become a new country — in other words, total integration.

We could also say that on the table below, 1-4 represents economic integration while 6-10 represents political integration. The halfway stage, 5, represents the single market, or the completion of economic integration.

0 5 10

Economic Integration Single Market Political Integration

Economic integration is the process by which different countries agree to remove trade barriers between them. Trade barriers can be tariffs (taxes imposed on imports to a country), quotas (a limit to the amount of a product that can be imported) and border restrictions. For example, Canada, Mexico and the United States have formed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which reduces trade barriers between the three countries. On the integration scale NAFTA, would be at about 2 since Canada, the U.S. and Mexico are still free to set their...