ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, governments’ policy choices have the ability to improve healthcare, education, and citizens’ overall well-being. Among the various approaches to achieving these goals, one model has recently taken center stage: promotion of regional integration, which is an outgrowth of free trade areas, customs unions, common markets and economic unions (Ravenhill 2011). In Africa, regional integration has remained an integral part of development strategy and has underpinned most pan-African development policies for the past 50 years. The appeal of regionalism was, for many policy makers in Africa, geographically intuitive. Colonialism created an extremely fragmented state system that, combined with economic and political marginality, encouraged the formation of a large number of inter-state organizations and institutions (Gibbs 2009). The elite consensus, at least rhetorically, was that most national markets were too narrow and inadequate to sustain sizeable economic operations. Integration would make it possible to promote intra-regional trade with neighbors and to pool resources for investment and efficient industrialization by taking advantage of the economies of scale that large markets provide. Cooperation and integration were therefore seen as important catalysts for utilizing Africa’s industrial potential and for accelerating economic growth and the development process (Iheduru 2011).
