Economic Integration in Practice

In this chapter we briefly survey the attempts at economic integration since the Second World War. While a fairly large building could be filled with the titles on the various economic integrations in this period our main purpose is to provide some basic information about some (more viable) economic integrations keeping in mind that our central interest lies in trade patterns. More comprehensive and issue-based discussions on most of the integrations mentioned in this chapter are available in the publications edited by Anderson and Blackhurst (1993) and de Melo and Panagariya (1993).