The Andean Group: Institutional Evolution, Intraregional Trade, and Economic Development

A simple statement motivates this paper: 1996 stands as the year of institutional reform. The statement comes from Monica Rosell (2002) of the General Secretariat of the Andean Community. To discuss this reform and see whether the Andean countries have moved toward meeting their joint goals during the early years of reform is the goal of this paper. Although there is little clear evidence of dramatic improvements corresponding with the institutional reform, the decade of the 1990s seems, overall, to have been a period of growing regional cooperation and economic improvement in the Andean region. This seems to suggest that the Andean reform has served more as a means of formalizing cooperative efforts already begun in the region than as a policy punctuation that caused sharp reversals of fortune. In either case, if ceremonial nationalism was a development-retarding factor in the Andean countries, the Trujillo reforms should help to solidify regional efforts in the future.