Regionalism as a Key Element of African Development Strategy

A key aspect of the development strategy, shared by many policy makers and economists today, is the recognition of the dynamic potential of regional cooperation and integration whereby developing countries can break out of their narrow national markets and form regional groupings as an instrument of economic decolonization. They tend to attribute the causes of failure of different development policies in the developing world to the series of independent efforts carried out in isolated compartments. In their view, developing countries have inadequate resources or the technical capacity to compete with the relatively more developed ones in the same underdeveloped regions, much less with the developed areas. Consequently, it is necessary to establish a gradual process of economic integration, as Raul Prebisch, for example, puts it, ‘to settle the balance-of-payments deficit, overcoming difficulties arising from the size of national markets, raising productivity and efficient use of regional resources, and also by serving as a strong stimulus for the incorporation of technical progress and many other objectives in international policy’.1 It is to this end that regional economic integration has emerged, in the post-war era, as one of the main developmental choices adopted by the developing countries.