Challenges to Regional Services Integration in South Asia

Abstract

Regional integration in services in South Asia holds considerable potential across many services. This article highlights the scope for and potential benefits from regional integration of services in this region and the many sectoral as well as cross-cutting challenges to this process. The article argues that there are regulatory, infrastructural, institutional and business environment related constraints in the SAARC member countries, which impede regional services integration. There are also political economy challenges which prevent progress on critical cross-cutting issues such as intraregional mobility of service providers and investment. The article argues for a broad-based, flexible regional services agreement, which takes a progressive approach to services integration alongside regional efforts to address issues of investment, regulatory harmonization, labour mobility and connectivity, national efforts to address issues of regulatory, institutional, infrastructural and human resource capacity and a favourable policy orientation and mindset at the individual country level.