Dhaka-based ‘South Asian Network on Economic Modelling (SANEM)’ on Wednesday said a deeper regional integration is needed in South Asia for generating and sustaining economic growth, and alleviating poverty.
“We shouldn’t abandon the SAARC process. There should be efforts to bring down the political rivalry in South Asia,” said SANEM executive director Selim Raihan at a press briefing on ‘the Future of Regional Integration in South Asia’ at the SANEM office in the city.
The political rivalry between India and Pakistan has often constrained the SAARC to be a functional regional forum. The recent cancellation of the 19th SAARC summit (which was scheduled to be held in Islamabad in November next) casts a dark shadow over the progress towards a unified South Asia, he said adding that there is also no positive indication that the situation will improve in the near future.
“The roles of civil society, private sector and media are very important to exert pressure on the respective governments for regional stability and peace,” said Raihan, also economics professor at Dhaka University.
Though there is a strong demand for a deeper regional integration in South Asia, the progress has been rather slow. Intra-regional trade in South Asia has been low. Intra-regional services trade and intra-regional investment are also low in South Asia, he said.
Furthermore, actual implementation of agreements often does not match the declared ambitions, and in this context, lack of political will and leadership, institutional weaknesses and capacity and resources constraints have been argued to be the major impeding factors, he added.
“There are several bodies of SAARC and they should continue their works. There have been many achievements so far, and we can’t afford losing them,” the SANEM Executive Director said.
Against the present context, he, however, said sub-regional cooperation can be an answer to the deadlock of regional integration in South Asia. A potential effective platform is the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal (BBIN) initiative, which is a sub-regional coordinative architecture of countries in South Asia.
As far as intra-BBIN trade is concerned, there are substantial potentials for rise in intra-regional trade, Raihan said.
However, despite that India has already provided almost full duty-free-quota-free of its market access to exports from South Asian LDCs, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan are facing escalated challenges to at least secure and then to increase their exports to Indian market, he said.
These challenges are related to their limited export capacities, lack of diversification of their export baskets, and various NTMs and POs both at home and in the Indian market, he added.
Source: Prothom-alo
