The optimal provision of regional public goods: comparing Latin American and Asian experiences

Regional integration can be an effective policy tool to promote cross-border cooperation and foster the provision of regional public goods, such as trade facilitating infrastructure, pooled regulatory institutions, harmonised regulatory regimes, etc. However, regional cooperation is often hampered by a number of factors. Particularly in developing countries, policymakers need a renewed and sound underlying conceptual framework in the wake of emerging global challenges which blur traditional distinctions between national and supra-national policies: sound methodologies to carry forward needs assessments and gap analysis aiming at identifying the scope for regional/pooled policy intervention and innovative instruments to implement collective policies, monitor compliance and assess their effectiveness. The project aims at stimulating research and policy dialogues on these three aspects. The focus will be on Latin America and the Caribbean but it will use the Asian and European experiences as comparators. The project will comprise three background studies, two conferences and a final publication.
The research focuses on four critical areas - the size, scale and type of interventions; optimal jurisdiction for common action; institutional formats of regional integration; sequencing of financial integration processes, both vis-à-vis other forms of integration as well as in terms of institutionalisation of the various regional financial initiatives (surveillance, swap lines etc.). Comparative experiences in these areas will be particularly useful for identifying the right benchmarks for Latin America (such as Asia in the 1990s or Europe in the early 1980s) should the region embark on regional financial integration.