Post-soviet economics in the context of international trade: opportunities and threats from mutual cooperation

Abstract

Regional cooperation represents a viable alternative to the ongoing process of globalization, in which countries can optimally respond to the changes in the external environment through regional integration, while a larger market size tends to provide better sales opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to identify common determinants of the impact of economic and trade cooperation on the convergence of the economies of the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). We attempt to define a conceptual framework for cooperation between post-Soviet countries with an emphasis on their diversity. In this article, we are using the extrapolation methods that involve the estimation of the parameters of approximating dependences with the ordinary least squares method (OLS) and its modifications as well as the exponential smoothing method. The main reason for conducting this study as well as the major value-added of this paper is in its focus on the regional cooperation of the post-Soviet countries with the assessment of its role on accelerating economic growth, while the main limitation of this study is its focus on predicting the values for one year only which is subjected to the lack of more recent data.