Compilation of articles on regional economic development and integration.

Regional integration is widely regarded as vital to speed up economic development in the Southern African region. This book bases on the belief that the process of intergration can be strengthened by confronting the rhetoric of policy makers with the empirical reality on the ground.

Developing countries have joined the rapidly growing global system of regional trade agreements (RTAs) over the past years. The drive towards regional integration has advanced with the formation of new markets and groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania with few developing countries remaining outside these regional schemes. This volume looks at how 'getting governance right' is a central element for successful RTA implementation, taking stock of the quality and effectiveness of the monitoring of development country RTAs around the world. Organized by the main world regions and primarily focusing on developing country RTAs, the book also includes two case studies focused on monitoring in developed country regional agreements by way of comparison. The contributors operationalize governance in the context of RTA implementation with a more narrow and technical term of 'monitoring' and provide eight important lessons for assessing monitoring around the world.

This volume brings together experts from different world regions. It presents various experiences with building indicator systems for monitoring the implementation of regional economic integration policies such as preferential trade areas, common markets or economic and monetary unions. The volume discusses both the technical and governance aspects of such systems, and best practices. The regional experiences that are covered include: the European Union, Eurasia, ASEAN, the East African Community (EAC), COMESA, CARICOM, the African-Caribbean-Pacific Group, and the Americas. In addition, various chapters discuss cross-cutting methodological challenges related to trade-related indicators.

By analysing investment flows and examining the role of foreign direct investment in key industries, this book examines why Southern Africa has not become a magnet for FDI and what it needs to do to attract more investment.

This book examines regional integration in Africa, with a particular focus on the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It argues that the SADC’s pursuit of a rationalist and state-centric form of integration for Southern Africa is limited, as it overlooks the contributory role and efficacy of non-state actors, who are relegated to the periphery. The book demonstrates that civil society networks in Southern Africa constitute well-governed, self-organised entities that function just like formal regional arrangements driven by state actors and technocrats. The book amplifies this point by deploying New Institutionalism and the New Regionalism Approach to examine the role and efficacy of non-state actors in building regions from below. The book develops a unique typology that shows how Southern African regional civil society networks adopt strategies, norms and rules to establish an efficient form of alternative integration in the region. Based on a critical analysis of this self-organised regionalism, the book projects the reality that alternative regionalism driven by non-state actors is possible. This book expands the study of regionalism in the SADC, and makes a significant and innovative contribution to the study of contemporary regionalism.

This book presents a theory of economic integration in developing regions, where the level of intraregional economic interdependence is low and the dependence on extra-regional economic relations is high. It argues that the success or failure of regional integration in the Global South is to a large degree dependent on the reaction of extra-regional actors in Europe, North America and Northeast Asia. In doing so, it demonstrates that longstanding European integration theories cannot be successfully applied to other world regions, where economic conditions are fundamentally different. By providing detailed empirical analyses that are systematic in their use of a common theoretical and methodological framework the authors fill a significant lacuna in our understanding of these issues. This edited volume will appeal to students and scholars of comparative regionalism, area studies and global governance.

This book offers a critical reflection of the North-South regional trade agreements (RTAs), known as the Economic Partnership Agreements, negotiated between the EU and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. Conceiving of regions as legal regimes, Clair Gammage highlights the challenges facing developing countries when negotiating RTAs with developed countries and interrogates the assumption that these agreements will and can promote sustainable development through trade.

This book explores regionalism in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and highlights the influence of the European Union (EU) as an extra-regional actor on the organization and integration process. The analysis is guided by theory and explains the emergence, institutional design and performance of SADC’s major integration projects in the issue areas of the economy, security and infrastructure. It provides in this way a profound assessment of the organization as a whole. The study shows that South Africa plays a regional key role as driver for integration while external influence of the EU is ambivalent in character because it unfolds a supportive or obstructive impact. The author argues that the EU gains influence over regional integration processes in the SADC on the basis of patterns of asymmetric interdependence and becomes a ‘game-changer’ insofar as it facilitates or impedes solutions to regional cooperation problems.