Economic Integration, according to Investopedia online, is, “an economic arrangement between different regions marked by the reduction or elimination of trade barriers and the coordination of monetary and fiscal policies. The aim of economic integration is to reduce costs for both consumers and producers, as well as to increase trade between the countries taking part in the agreement.”
According to Norman Girwan, in his paper entitled, ‘Caricom’s Elusive Quest For Economic Integration,’ the Caribbean needed to integrate for similar reasons. Girwan states that the move toward such integration was driven by the need to mitigate against the constraints of small size on development, as well as there were other non-eceonomic objectives. These included “attaining national independence, sharing the costs of common services, pooling bargaining power in international environment and instituting a common West Indian identity.” Girwan continues by stating emphatically that “economic integration is still a work in progress for the Caribbean peoples; and what has been accomplished so far has not impacted significantly on regional economic development.” He attests that “this could be due to faulty implementation of agreed integration schemes, or to inappropriate design of the schemes themselves, or to inherent limits in the capacity of economic integration per se to drive development in these economies.”
In a similar manner, Mehmet Ekizoglu, in his paper Mercosur, It’s History, Institutions and Questions; outlines that the origins of the integration process required Argentina and Brazil to overcome their distrust to each other, in order to approve the Bilateral Common Market, and the importance of Paraguay's and Uruguay's later adherence to create MERCOSUR. In fact, Ekizoglu cites the origins of the move on the South American continent to have been precipitated by the works