Trade and Monetary Regionalism

There has been a marked tendency to treat trade and monetary regionalism independently and scant attention has been paid to the connections between the two. The conventional wisdom has been that trade integration must precede monetary integration. However, this 'trade-first' sequencing has recently come under scrutiny in Latin America and particularly in east Asia, which is actively considering if and how intra-regional monetary cooperation might be enhanced in parallel with ongoing steps towards trade integration. There are in fact some good reasons to question the 'trade-first' conventional wisdom.