The process of Latin American Integration in the XXI Century

Latin America started its economic integration after send World War and continues to walk the same path in the XXI century. However, this has not been an easy task and the process has been affected by national, regional and international course of events, bearing different fruits. The present article intends to respond to the question “To what extent Latin American economic integration and economic development has been successful?” The hypothsis of the present research is that in comparison with other regional integrations, Latin America’s achievement on trade policies has been considerable. However, it lags behind on export diversification and share of global trade.The existing literature on the subject could be classified to two groups. The first is of the belief that bigger Latin American countries have a higher chance of an effective economic integration, while the smallers do not really appreciate the advantages of such integration, given their bilateral relations with US and EU. The second group shares the idea that Latin America has a holistic approach regarding trade liberalization policies, but could not increase its share from global trade because it does not very much support financial and economic integration.To study and prove the hypothesis, an informative- analytical approach will be adopted to consider the achievements of the Latin American trade and economic organizations.