Why do States Pursue Regional Integration with Their Allies? The "Security Externality of Trade" Approach, 1956-2001.

To explain the uneven patterns shown in 24 regional integration organizations' (RIOs) institutional achievement during 1956-2001, I explain regional integration levels in terms of positive or negative security externalities of trade. Generally, regional integration tends to increase intraregional trade. Therefore, if states pursue regional integration with non-allies or foes, they would be exposed to potentially high "negative" security externalities of trade. In contrast, if they pursue regional integration with their allies, they would gain "positive" security externalities of trade. In this light, if a given RIO's members are composed exclusively of allies promising defense pact, the members are more likely to achieve the highest level of regional integration. In contrast, if states pursue regional integration with non-allies or foes, they are more likely to achieve a very low level of integration. Of course, although this explanation is not a totally new hypothesis, the impact of alliance has not been examined rigorously and systemically. Therefore, this paper's main purpose is to estimate the impact of intraregional alliance on regional integration. Specifically, as the method of robustness checks, the impact of intraregional alliance is tested (1) with three alternative measures of alliance (2) against similar but distinct three dependent variables and (3) by multivariate models with twenty alternative explanatory variables. The models are tested against 537 cases. These cases are obtained from the Integration Achievement Score dataset. According to empirical findings, intraregional alliance is the most robust and important general cause in that its signs and statistical significance are always consistent. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]