Indian Ocean Regionalism by Dennis Rumley & Timothy Doyle

Author:Dennis Rumley & Timothy Doyle [Rumley, Dennis & Doyle, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367739072
Google: mCH6zQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55872731
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

7. Multiple trade agreements

Regional integration is no longer a straitjacketed strategy of promoting trade and investment transactions among contiguous members of a region per se. Across the world, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, signing numerous cross-regional trade agreements has become common practice. Countries no longer intend to intensify trade links only with the members of regional organisations like ASEAN, ECO, SAARC or BIMSTEC (a Bay of Bengal sub-regional group). Multiple and overlapping trading arrangements through such strategies as bilateral trade agreement, sub-regional groups (BIMSTEC) and trans-regional groups (APEC, EAS) are the preferred practice today. Growth-led strategies of contemporary economies are luring the state to cultivate networks of economic linkages in the hope of attaining a cumulative benefit of increased growth rates. These networked economic alliances ignore the conventional boundaries of a ‘region’. It is not only the pulls of economic integration that force states to look beyond their immediate regions, but geopolitics also clearly influences their choices. Membership in more than one group is sought to gain political identity across the regions, to be part of a great power-dominated alliance, to counter a rival's presence in it, to influence regional economic and political affairs and to balance the role of a dominant regional power. Both developed and developing countries are resorting to a policy of trans-regional political and economic identity building. SAARC, an otherwise ignored regional group during the Cold War period, is today attracting countries like China, Japan and the US as well as other regional groups like the European Union as its observers.

South Asian countries too have entered into several overlapping trade arrangements, partly to overcome the regional political and economic limitations and partly to enlarge the prospects of integrating their economies with regions/countries with higher growth potential or economic complementarities. Pakistan is in ECO; Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka are in BIMSTEC; India is a founder member of the Mekong Ganga Cooperation, an Indochina sub-regional group; India and Sri Lanka are members of the IOR–ARC. In addition, several bilateral trade agreements have been signed between the individual SAARC countries and members of other regional groups, like the ASEAN. Commenting on these overlapping affiliations by South Asian countries, a UN study argues that such

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