Forces Pushing to Trade Liberalization and Cooperation Agreements

Abstract

This literature review is aimed at investigating the different forces that lead countries to intend liberalizing their economies at the point to be increasingly more integrated and interdependent economically in the current context of globalization. Also, it is examined on the whole the reasons for which the countries sign cooperation agreements. The primary objective is to show that economic forces are not the only ones pushing the countries to participate more actively in the global world by liberalizing their economies and signing cooperation agreements. Instead, we found that apart from pure economic reasons -very well explained by theory-, there are geopolitical, socio-demographic and technological forces that increasingly push countries to integrate their economies and signing economic cooperation agreements. Also, we could not rule out there could be another forces to be identified in future studies.