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    Economic Cooperation: The Emerging Scenario
    (Institute of Policy Studies of Pakistan, 2012) Kelegama, Saman
    Considering China continuously increasing importance for the global level, increased economic cooptation between China and SAARc member countries will be mutually beneficial, particularly for the South Asia . SAARC's own success in achieving desired level of regionalism has been limited, and China's involvement can become a catalyst in this regard. While trade between China and SAARC has been increasing in recent years, the potential of economic cooptation is much more beyond trade alone. China's engagement can address some of SAARC's fundamental shortfalls such as inability to generate funds for crucial projects and no progress towards knowledge and technology transfers. Regardless of China's full membership of SAARC, its active involvement in South Asia will continue to grow. - Eds.
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    Towards Greater Economic Connectivity in South Asia
    (Sameeksha, 2007) Kelegama, Saman
    To strengthen economic connectivity in south Asia, members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation should not depend solely on the SAARC framework, and the agreement on the South Asia Free Trade Area. The natural market integration process that started in south Asia with the high growth in India in particular, can give an impetus to strengthening economic connectivity. The private sector in south Asia, through the SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has to play a key role as a pressure group to remove impediments for economic integration. Steps also need to betaken to not overload the SAARC agenda with soft issues so that economic connectivity issues receive due attention.
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    SAARC — From Association to Community: a Small Country Economic Perspective
    (1999) Kelegama, Saman
    This essay has given a small country perspective of SAFTA and a more advanced level of economic cooperation in the region. The essay identified four broad areas as major areas of concern for a small member country: (a) political commitment; (b) market access; (c) safeguarding domestic producers; and (c~ trade and investment supporting policies. The concerns in these areas have to be effectively addressed in order to reap the benefits of a PTA or FTA. At present, the domestic policy support for SAFTA remains lukewarm. As long as this is the case, initiatives by the political establishment for regional cooperation will continue to be ambiguous, sporadic, and fragmented, leading to a ’stop and go’ pattern of regional cooperation in SAARC. In such patterns of cooperation, SAARC growth in terms of regional institutional development and programme implementation will remain uncertain, and the organisation’s life cycle will oscillate between short-lived euphoria and agonisingly protracted stalemates.
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    SAFTA: a Critique
    (2004) Kelegama, Saman
    In this paper, an attempt is made to examine the SAPTA agreement that was signed by the Foreign Ministers of the SAARC member countries at the 12th SAARC Summit. First a brief survey is made in Section II on SAPTA. Section III then makes an assessment of the SAFTA agreement in the light of the Group of Eminent Persons (GEP) report recommendations. Section IV has some concluding remarks.
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    Regionalism Debate: Repositioning SAFTA
    (2005) Kelegama, Saman; Adhikari, Ratnakar
    Critics have pointed out that there is no rationale for a Regional Trade Agreement (RTA) in South Asia because there are limited complementarities in the region; major trading partners of the individual South Asian countries are located in the West etc. The latest World Bank report on the South Asia’s trade argues that an RTA in South Asia will lead to substantial trade diversion than trade creation and considers an RTA in the region as a stumbling bloc to multilateral trade liberalization. This argument needs re-examination and for this purpose it will be worthwhile first to revisit the theoretical debate on regionalism. This is done in the Section II followed by a discussion in Section III on the South Asian perspective of an RTA. Some concluding remarks are made in Section IV.
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