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Customs unions enable countries to freely access each other’s markets, which is thought to increase intra-regional trade and economic growth. However, accession to a customs union also comes with the condition that all members need to consent to a common external trade policy. Especially if countries feature different economic structures, this may...
Citations
... fectly rational agent of neoclassical economics, with AI capable of perceiving the world around them and taking actions to advance specified goals (Athey & Imbens, 2019;Mullainathan & Spiess, 2017;Saber et al., 2022). ...
... Although the evidence on the successfulness of such strategies is mixed (as the ongoing war in Ukraine sadly demonstrates), policymakers continue to show great interest in the link between regional economic integration and other (economic) outcomes. The recent wave of policy-driven studies monitoring and analysing regional integration outcomes in various parts of the world is evidence of this ( [11], [12], [13], [14], [15] and selected publications below). ...
Due to its focus on prediction rather than causal inference, machine learning has long been treated somewhat neglectfully in the economic literature. For several reasons, however, interest in machine learning has surged recently and is slowly finding its way into the econometric toolbox. Within the economic literature, regional integration has been one of the research areas at the forefront of this development, with various studies experimenting with different machine learning techniques to shed light on the complex dynamics governing regional integration processes. This paper provides the first systematic review of the literature that uses machine learning to study regional economic integration. The focus is twofold, first analysing studies along various thematic and methodological features (and the links between them), and then discussing the scope and nature of policy insights derived from the surveyed body of literature.
