Central Asia Economic Paper No. 8, May 2013
By Alexander Libman and Daria Ushkalova
The Customs Union constitutes the first regional trade agreement in the post-Soviet space based on effective enforcement of commitments made by the member states.
However, intra-regional trade was liberalized to a great extent already before the CU came into existence.
The preliminary econometric estimations suggest that the CU had limited effect on cross-border trade: the effects were present only in particular industries.
From the descriptive data, Belarus seems to be the only winner of the CU.
