Yes / A large body of literature exists in the area of trade integration in various regions of the world (for instance
Mongelli, Dorrucci & Agur 2005 for EU; Chen and Nory 2011 for EU; Bouet, Cosnard & Laborde, 2017 for
Africa, Athukorala & Yamashita 2006 for East Asia; Bussiere, Fidrmuc and Schnatz 2005 for Central and Eastern
European countries). However, not much literature is available on South Asia trade and economic integration.
Intra-regional trade just formed only 5% (in absolute terms 23$ billion) of South Asia’s total trade in comparison
with the ASEAN region (25%) (World Bank). This is indeed perplexing as the countries within the region even
though heterogeneous in terms of size and governed by different political ideologies, yet share similar cultural
and historical closeness, high level of poverty and low level of human development (Arora and Ratnasari 2014).
Among the factors influencing low formal intra-regional trade are high trade barriers, high level of mistrust among
the countries leading to several conflicts especially between India and Pakistan. This chapter examines some of
these issues and especially examines the association between low human development, institutional development
and regional integration. / The full-text of this chapter will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo - 12 months after publication.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19600 |
| Date | 21 September 2023 |
| Creators | Arora, Rashmi |
| Publisher | World Scientific Publishing |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book chapter, Accepted manuscript |
| Rights | Unspecified |
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