Regional integration in Latin-America : the Mercosul's impacts in regional trade flows

• Autor(a) principal: Domingues, Tiago
• Data de Publicação: 2000
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/24247
• topic: Economic Integration; Trade; Forecasting and Simulation; MERCOSUL

MERCOSUR is one of the youngest regional integration agreements, gathering two of the largest and most developed latin-american economies (Argentina and Brazil). The unparalelled growth of intra-regional trade is one of the most visible results of this agreement, raising the question of whether or not this type of integration scheme distorts regional trade flows. In fact, This papers approaches the MERCOSUR Regional Agreement, showing its efforts, main goals and tries to conclude if its impressive growth in regional trade distorts or not the patterns of trade flows in the region. Applying different sets of empirical methodologies, it is found that intra-MERCOSUL trade growth is mainly, the result of Trade Creation, therefore not affecting in a negative way international trade flows.