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Regionalism and Integration in the Middle East and North Africa

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Regional Integration in the Middle East and North Africa

Part of the book series: The Political Economy of the Middle East ((PEME))

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Abstract

Regionalism has become a prevalent characteristic of international relations and international political economy. Many scholars think that regionalism is a response to globalisation. Best and Christiansen (2014) explain that regionalism constitutes one of the few tools that are available to states to try to manage the effects of globalisation, by means of regaining some control over global market forces and countering the more negative social consequences of globalisation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A situation in which no feasible change can raise anybody’s welfare without lowering that of somebody else. This applies to reallocation of final goods between different users, reallocation of factors of production to different industries and changes in the composition of final goods produced (Mishan 2013).

  2. 2.

    Greece exiting the Eurozone and returns to the drachma, its national currency.

  3. 3.

    A sub-regional integration project established in 1981 comprising the oil rich states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Low and Salazar 2011). According to its General Secretary Charter, it aims to coordinate integration between its member states in all fields, including: macro-economics, trade, finance, industry, agriculture, water, religion, research and development.

  4. 4.

    Established in 1989, the Maghreb Union consist of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. It aims to establish a trading bloc and a common market by means of integrating the economies of the member states (Darrat and Pennathur 2002).

  5. 5.

    GAFTA was concluded in 1997 between fourteen MENA states. It is a multilateral FTA that aims to progressively remove tariff and non-tariff barriers on intra-MENA trade by 2007 (Hosny 2013a).

  6. 6.

    The complementarity index ranges from 0 to 100, with higher values indicating greater complementarity. In highly successful integrated regions, the complementarity indexes are above 50, whilst for moderately successful ones, they are between 25 and 30 (World Bank 2011).

  7. 7.

    These are official exchange rate estimations and not PPP estimations.

  8. 8.

    Current US$.

  9. 9.

    US dollars per capita, current prices.

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  1. Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Tarik Oumazzane

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Oumazzane, T. (2021). Regionalism and Integration in the Middle East and North Africa. In: Regional Integration in the Middle East and North Africa. The Political Economy of the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6452-3_3

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