Political and economic leaders in practically every region and sub-region of the world have assigned and continue to assign high priority to enhancing regional cooperation and integration. The rationale for this priority is simple. With the exception of a few economies—like China, India, Brazil, and Turkey—the absolute size of the vast majority of emerging economies is too small for their businesses to achieve economies of scale necessary to compete in the global markets.

At the same time, they are not yet ready to compete directly with the global actors. Often regional cooperation is considered as a useful first step for their firms to learn how to compete outside their home markets and at the same time achieve greater regional trade and investment flows. In East Asia, regional trade has reached 50 percent or more of its total trade, almost approaching the levels in European Union. But elsewhere—Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Latin America—regional trade accounts for only between 5 and 25 percent.

Centennial Group has reviewed the reasons for this subpar performance, despite the high political priority, in all regions, either as free standing studies or as part of larger studies aimed to improve economic performance of individual regions (Africa, Asia, Central Asia and Latin America). In all cases, its studies have proposed policies and institutional reforms as well as improvements in infrastructure and logistics necessary to improve the outcomes under an open regionalism approach.

Our Team

Meet the principal(s) that lead our Regional Cooperation and Integration assignments: