Regional Integration And Interdependence

INTERDEPENDENCE
It should not be taken for granted that interaction is proportionally intertwined with interdependence. Interdependence attempts to capture the idea of “regioness” of a region. Interdependence can be asserted and measured on different scales such as political, economic, social and infrastructural and security. The yardstick for asserting the degree of interdependency can be easily measured via the migration of goods, services, people, capital, and the mobility of labour (Abbey, 2011).
There are other forms of interdependency that can’t be measured, an indirect method can be used such processes like the voting behaviour patterns in some multilateral organizations might be a solution to a regional policy convergence or divergence.

As with many social science definitions, the term however is less clear cut when used more specifically; it is used both to describe a process and a state, and additionally there have been quite a number of attempts, more or less constructive, to define regional integration so that no common understanding emerges (Wallace 1999 & Mattli 1999). Regional integration can also be said to generally involve a complex web of cooperation between countries within a given geographical area, to harmonize policies in such sectors as trade, investment, infrastructural, as well as monetary and fiscal policies of member

free trade areas, customs union, common markets, economic union etc.
FREE TRADE AREAS
Free trade area is the most basic form of economic cooperation. Member countries remove all barriers to trade between themselves but are free to independently determine trade policies with non-member nations. A free trade area is a suppression of discrimination in the field of commodity movements among member countries. In this regard, they often agree to suppress or gradually eliminate all trade restrictions. An example is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
A FTA is regarded as the best policy to be considered if the region’s objective is to be independent from countries outside the region. In a FTA, tariff and other trade restrictions between member countries and third parties remain unaffected, and member countries are free to impose any level of tariffs against non‐members countries. This is good for tariff revenue, particularly for Africa, since its intra-industry levels are low at this point in time and will not affect trade revenue that