Quazi Tasnim Hasan
ID # 112 111 051
Assignment No. 4
What is economic integration?
For the Last 65 years, the world has undergone significant changes. The decade of the 1970s was dominated by the two energy crises. Industrial economies were faced with a new “enemy”: stagflation—a combination of high inflation and unemployment. Developing countries were increasingly becoming more dependent on foreign borrowing and centrally planned economies were unable to secure economic growth. Furthermore, the world witnessed a radical transformation during the past two decades. The greatest economic experiment of the twentieth century was the movement from communism to a market economy, which began in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russia in the mid-1980s, and then spread to Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s and to China later on during the same decade. Although the transition to a free market has led to disappointing outcomes, most Eastern Europe countries have concentrated on integrating their economies with Europe and on becoming part of the EU. All these events led to the world becoming more and more global in nature and to defining globalization as a closer economic integration among nations through increased trade and capital flows. It also refers to labor movement and technology transfer across international borders as well as cultural and political issues, which are beyond the scope of this chapter. Globalization is the result of technological processes occurring mainly in the areas of information technology, telecommunications, energy, transport, and biotechnology as well as a shift in economic policies. In this chapter a number of international organizations, such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank were presented and their role in terms of globalization and economic integration issues described. In the course of all these developments, “economic integration,”