Economic integration, process in which two or more states in a broadly defined geographic area reduce a range of trade barriers to advance or protect a set of economic goals.
The level of integration involved in an economic regionalist project can vary enormously from loose association to a sophisticated, deeply integrated, transnationalized economic space. It is in its political dimension that economic integration differs from the broader idea of regionalism in general. Although economic decisions go directly to the intrinsically political question of resource allocation, an economic region can be deployed as a technocratic tool by the participating government to advance a clearly defined and limited economic agenda without requiring more than minimal political alignment or erosion of formal state sovereignty. The unifying factor in the different forms of economic regionalism is thus the desire by the participating states to use a wider, transnationalized sense of space to advance national economic interests.
Forms of economic integration
Although there are many different forms of economic integration, perhaps the most convenient way to order the concept is to think of a continuum that ranges from loose association at one end to an almost complete merging of national economies at the other end. Although it is far from a given that positive experiences in the simpler forms of economic integration will lead to a deepening of the process to increasingly integrated shared economic spaces, the more-complex forms incorporate and are founded on the substantive elements of the earlier forms. The significant point is that although economic integration is explicitly framed by trading relationships, it acquires an increasingly political character as it reaches deeper forms.
Simple free-trade area
The most basic type of economic integration is a simple free-trade area. In