Global and Regional Integration: an Equality of Access Approach

I explore the interpretation of global and regional economic integration as issues of equality of access for producers in di¤erent locations to any particular market. An industry in an individual country can be seen as becoming more globalised as producers worldwide gain more equal access to that market: if increasing access is only concentrated within a region of the world, then the market should be viewed as regionalised. This approach suggests that it is appropriate to apply economic in- equality measures (the Lorenz curve and Gini coe¢ cient and related en- tropy indices) to measuring the extent of global and regional integration. The market of an apparently open economy should be seen as regionalised (rather than globalised) if there is a high degree of equality of access be- tween producers within the region, but inequality vis-à-vis other foreign producers. In this case, the change in Gini coe¢ cient for access to a coun- try from classing together those countries within ?the region? and those outside ?the region?would be small. The third measure is the Gini co- e¢ cient comparing home and foreign producers, which corresponds most closely to standard openness measures. Overall, comparing 9 specimen economies, I ?nd that when market access for all countries is taken into account, the USA is the most glob- alised and India and China are the least globalised, with EU countries, Canada and Turkey somewhere in between. The smaller EU economies, which are very open on standard measures, should probably be viewed as regionalised rather than globalised.