A STUDY OF REGIONAL INTEGRATION IN WEST AFRICA;CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS
ABSTRACT
The age-long practice of the individual survival of nations have long given way to the emergent concept of integration and cooperation among states as an option to meeting the collective development needs of the cooperating states. Practice has shown over time that when states take comparative advantage of each other’s strength and weaknesses, it opens the space and engenders the potentials for specialization, development of the economies of scale and indeed reduces the cost of production. Consequently, it enhances the purchasing power of the citizenry. In recent times, there have been significant increases in the efforts of developing countries especially in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve regional economic integration. The advent of the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) have given new impetus to the global African and regional integration processes and has focused particular attention on the need to take decisive action to tackle the continent’s numerous problems through the instrument of the economic integration strategy. This paper appreciates the evolution of regional integration and analyses the rationale for economic integration in West Africa. It evaluates the challenges and prospects of integration in West Africa.
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Regional integration as a strategy of the collective economic survival of nations around the world has gained prominence in recent times. It has given nations the options of cooperation and competition. It has provided for participating states the options of promoting the best areas of specialization whilst at the same time ceding to other participating nations products considered to be within the purview of the strength of those other states. The most attractive factor of integration is chronicled on the general principle of the creation of a common market where goods, services and capital are guaranteed freedom of movement unhindered within the integrated area. This guarantee includes the right of residence and establishment. In the sub Saharan African regions, we have seen the revitalization or the expansion of existing regional economic arrangements and the formation of new groupings. The foregoing initiatives have interestingly coincided with the current developments in the Western and industrialized world who have since taken up the instrument of economic integration as a vehicle to political and socio-economic prosperity. Regional economic integration is increasingly recognized as the viable space within which small and developing economies can better organize themselves to survive economically and politically in a highly competitive world. The Economic integration strategy in West Africa is fashioned along the lines of the European Union. The Treaty of ECOWAS reveals a compendium so similar the E U Treaty in so many respects. Since we are living in a global village with closely knit ties and economic engagements across different borders, it follows therefore that the factors that affect the integration process in the European Union has great potentials of spilling over to the other economies and more particularly West Africa, with its nascent and undeveloped integration experiment. This article shall seek to evaluate and elicit those factors that have challenged the development of the ECOWAS experiment in attaining the desired goals of economic integration and further espouse the potential gains of moving on with the strategy as an antidote to the current unacceptable and intolerable economic conditions in the sub region. The paper shall further interrogate by way of comparative evaluation the impact of the current crisis in the EU showing whether or not the west African experiment can be insulated from the vagaries of this crisis, since the later was fashioned along the lines of the former and bring to the fore what lessons that are to be learnt there from.
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