Trade Reforms and Economic Integration in South Asia: SAARC to SAPTA

Mamta Chowdhury ()

Applied Econometrics and International Development, 2005, vol. 5, issue 4

Abstract: As Globalisation and regionalism gained its momentum from the beginning of 1980s and the gain from open trade is realised by the pioneer East Asian nations (especially, the ASEAN countries), the South Asian countries also tried to catch up with the stream under the banner of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The objective of the study is to assess the liberalisation efforts by these nations. Our empirical results in terms of trade among the regional group suggest that the smaller countries, namely Bangladesh and Sri Lanka reap the higher gains from openness, whereas trade with other international partners, it took India and Bangladesh to gain international competitiveness until mid 1990s. Our study indicates Pakistan and Sri Lanka’s trade liberalisation efforts don’t seem to have much positive impact in terms of international trade.

Keywords: SAARC; SAPTA; SAFTA; Trading Bloc; Intra- and international Competitiveness; Real exchange rate; Openness in trade regime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.usc.es/economet/reviews/aeid542.pdf
No

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eaa:aeinde:v:5:y:2005:i:4_2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.usc.es/economet/info.htm

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Applied Econometrics and International Development from Euro-American Association of Economic Development
Bibliographic data for series maintained by M. Carmen Guisan ().