Why is Eurasian integration attractive?

Egypt expects the agreement on a free trade zone with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) will be signed by the end of the year. The Minister of Trade and Industry of Egypt, Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, told Sputnik that he would meet the head of the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, Victor Khristenko, before September 10th in Cairo to start serious negotiations on the issue. The Minister stressed that cooperation between Egypt and the EAEU was obviously mutually beneficial. He hopes that trade relations will become more intensive (3-5 times more) after the signing of the agreement, especially in the spheres of agriculture and engineering. It is no accident that the North African country intends to cooperate with the Eurasian Union.

Maxim Lavnichenko, Deputy Director General of the Center for Political Information, is sure that “the aspiration of the Eurasian region countries to become more competitive on the global market is the basis of the economic premises for integration. The economies of the integrating countries alone face greater challenges in independently accessing global markets. The Eurasian Economic Union could become a springboard to the global economy for all of these countries. In other words, at first the Eurasian Union will allow a number of problems within each region to be solved, and then already go together into the global space, competing with more successful economies.”

Speaking about the prospects of establishing a large market for goods and services within the region, Lavnichenko notes that “each of the integrating countries is interested in the sales market for its products, and the large-scale market, again, will open new opportunities for intra-regional trade.”

No less an important economic prerequisite for integration is also the desire to obtain a synergy from economic cooperation of different industries inside the economic union, according to the expert. “Literally two decades ago Eurasia was a harmonious economic system that worked within the framework of the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, production chains were broken. Today, in the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union, a chance to restore the chain arises, to give impetus to already existing industries and create new ones. Indeed, competent implementation of transport streams, the implementation of these logistic advantages, may become another additional point of growth for the entire region.”

Maxim Lavnichenko also mentions self-sufficiency of natural resources in the region: “Russia and Kazakhstan have huge potential in the field of hydrocarbons. Armenia and Belarus possess excellent, tremendous agricultural resources. All this makes the region self-sufficient in resources. Of course, the availability of resources in itself is not a sufficient basis for economic growth, but nevertheless it is an essential factor for the development of industry in the region.”