Essay On The Significance Of Regionalism

I EMERGENCE OF REGIONALISM

Global economic integration is a phenomenon that can be traced back to seven centuries ago since the travels of Marco Polo. Since his travel, integration has taken place through trade, factor movements and communication of economically useful knowledge and technology and is on the rise ever since.

Regionalism is considered to be far from being uniform process; it has however emerged in various stages which are shaped by both external and internal factors. The starting point for regionalism is roughly estimated to be post the Second World War. Of all the regional groupings that exist currently, only one of these existed before World War II, the American System. Historically, the movement of economic groupings started in Europe as a getting together of the states which had suffered due to World War II as a means of rehabilitation.

Like said in the previous paragraph, regionalism developed

Throughout this period, intra-European trade both rose dramatically and constituted a vast portion of global commerce. Moreover, economic integration became sufficiently extensive that, by the turn of the twentieth century, Europe had begun to function as a single market in many respects. The industrial revolution and technological advances attendant to it that facilitated inter-state commerce clearly had pronounced effects on European integration; but so did the creation of various customs unions and bilateral trade agreements. Besides the well-known German Zollverein, the Austrian states established a customs union in 1850, as did Switzerland in 1848, Denmark in 1853, and Italy in the 1860s. The latter coincided with Italian statehood, not an atypical impetus to the initiation of a PTA in the nineteenth century. In addition, various groups of nation-states forged customs unions, including Sweden and Norway and Moldavia and