Regionalism: Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia Compared

This chapter is concerned with the remarkable revival of interest in academic and policy circles in regional trade and economic cooperation arrangements between developing countries. Having long been discounted by economists on the grounds that the costs of trade diversion were likely to far outweigh the efficiency gains from trade creation and dismissed by policy-makers for its failure in practice to accelerate the pace of economic development, regional integration in the developing world has now ‘come in from the cold’ and is being actively promoted as a vehicle for promoting economic growth and development.