Regional Partners in Global Markets: Limits and Possibilities of the Euro-Med Agreements

As debate continues over regionalism versus multilateralism, pro-regional integration policymakers confront many questions. Which countries should they integrate with? What form of integration is best? And under what conditions will integration further the national interest?This book helps to answer such questions and, thus, assist countries in making the best of preferential trade agreements. It provides evidence of actual and possible effects of recent trade agreements--NAFTA, AFTA, and EU agreements with Tunisia and Morocco. It also discusses the potential impact of an Egypt-EU agreement, at both the national and sectoral levels, and offers policy options for Egypt.Ahmed Galal is director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies and coauthor of Bureaucrats in Business: The Economics and Politics of Government Ownership (Oxford, 1996). Bernard Hoekman, a CEPR research fellow, is a senior economist in the International Economics Department of the World Bank. A former member of the GATT Secretariat, he is the coauthor of The Political Economy of the World Trading System: From GATT to WTO (Oxford, 1995).Copublished by CEPR and The Egyptian Center for Economic Studies