The paper provides a comprehensive account of intra-trade in South Asia, which traditionally has existed more at an informal level among the countries of the region such as between India & Pakistan and Bangladesh & India. Intra-trade in early periods prior to SAARC has been merely 6–8 per cent of the aggregate trade as against 22 per cent within ASEAN Free Trade Area and 65 per cent within the European Union. It analyzes reasons of low intra-trade such as protectionist policies of the earlier regimes prior to that existing during the preliberalization era of eighties. It analyzes the impact of SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement (SAPTA) enacted on April 11, 1993 during the Seventh SAARC Summit in Dhaka and the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) agreed at Islamabad SAARC Summit on January 6, 2004 that became operationalised with effect from January 1, 2006. The paper concludes that the ultimate success of SAFTA is not only dependent on the legal framework as negotiated in the SAFTA document but also on the political and economic stability and growth in the member states as well as relationships among them, particularly between the two dominant nations - India and Pakistan - which alone account for more than 80 per cent of Group's GDP.
Non-tariff barriers, SAARC, WTO, SAFTA, SAPTA, ASEAN
