What Are the Objections of the Economic Partnership Agreement?
In the early 2000s, the European Union (EU) developed a means of assisting Third World countries in their integration into the world economy. This was called the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). The EPA's purpose was to integrate key sectors of the Third World, especially in the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific. The key sectors are normally based on the regional areas of specialization and include things like timber, oil, minerals and their domestic markets. Under the agreement, important elements of development assistance, preferential trade and other benefits are awarded to these poorer states, while the EU continues to work for their economic integration to maximize their earning potential. Such a scheme has not been without critics.
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Economics and Power
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According to professor Normal Girvan of the University of the West Indies, the very fact that this process is largely controlled by the European Union is a problem. This is because the EU and its allies are already highly developed states with money. This creates an imbalance of power between the wealthy and the poor. While it is true that the developing world receives certain benefits, these are given largely at the direction of the EU. Girvan has accused EPA drafters of rushing the agreement into action with minimal input from the Third World.
Economics and Democracy
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As an addendum to the power of the EU, the fact that the EPA demands regional integration and political democracy strongly suggests that its purpose is not to assist the Third World, at least not directly, but to force open the markets of the developing world to compensate for economic problems in Europe. The EU itself is not democratically controlled, and the European Parliament is largely an advisory body rather than a legislative one. Many individuals in the Third World, including Peter Thompson and Eduardo Zepeda, scholars in development economics, hold that these agreements are about finding and development new markets to compensate for saturated and indebted Western world markets.
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Economics and Sovereignty
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Agreements such as the EPA, in the opinion of Girvan, remove all local control over basic economic decisions. In the Third World, states divided through party factionalism can become weak. According to Girvan, his main objection to the EPA is sovereignty. He rejects the concept of a world order dominated by a handful of European firms and banks or an integrated and unresponsive Third World market with little say over its economic and political life. For him, the EPA, in other words, is a recipe for continued, institutional dependence on the developed world.
Economics and Control
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A more general objection is that the EPA enshrines the "free market" as the central organizing principle of the developing economies. This largely removes the state from any real economic role. "Market" in this case is not an abstract concept, but something that has been created by a dominant power. The creation of a market, so it would seem, reflects the interests of those who create it. Therefore, the market is not "free," but geared to the interests of the European firms that will oversee its implementation. The basic assumption is that Third World states and organizations are incapable of market creation and thus it must be done for them.
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