Interlinked Patterns
ARIF A. WAQIF
REGIONAL ECONOMIC COOPERA¬TION IN ASIA: BANGLADESH, INDIA, PAKISTAN AND SRI LANKA by Charan D. Wadhva, S.A. Keza, H.G. Siddiqui, Zafar Mahmood, S. Suresh Varam, Y. Schokman Allied Publishers, Ahmedabad, 1988, 1.5 pp., 125
Sept-Oct 1988, volume 12, No 5

The November 1987 Kathmandu Summit ‘ of the leaders of the SAARC countries seems to have accepted the principle that efforts of these countries to operationalize ‘regional cooperation can only be helped—by including the economic dimensions of regional cooperation at some future date in the official SAARC action plan. Accordingly it suggested that exploratory studies to help identify specific areas of economic cooperation among the SAARC countries would be worth undertaking. At this Summit there was also some inconclusive discussion about the possibility of exploring areas of inter-regional cooperation between the SAARC and ASEAN countries.

In anticipation of the likelihood that ‘economic cooperation will eventually be included in the official action plan of SAARC—so far only nine so-called non-controversial areas had been included in the plan—the South Asian academic community had already taken up various studies to explore specific areas of trade and investment cooperation which could be mutually beneficial.

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