Towards an evaluation of regional integration in Latin America in the 1990s

Abstract

THE decade of the 1990s has witnessed a wave of regional integrationinitiatives in Latin America: more than 15 agreements — free trade areasor customs unions — since 1990 with a handful more in varying degrees ofnegotiation (see Table 1). However, this was not just a Latin Americanphenomenon as regionalism has more than ever become a global trend (Mistry,1996). Indeed, now Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are the only World TradeOrganisation (WTO) members which are not signatories of at least onepreferential trade agreement (WTO, 1995).1Regional integration is not new to Latin America. Economic integration playedan important role in the region’s early post-war economic history. The 1960s and1970s saw a number of very ambitious initiatives inspired by the successfulWestern European experience (Ffrench-Davis, Mun˜oz and Palma, 1994). Indeed,at its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the topic of integration was hard toavoid in the discussion of Latin American development. However, disillusionmentwith integration processes had clearly set in by the late 1970s and the discussion ofregional integration was all but silenced by the external crisis of the early 1980s