ECONOMIC SYSTEMS. - The totality of the economic activities of individuals and the action of political authority, which tends to coordinate individual ends with social ones. In every period of history several economic systems have always coexisted, because remnants of superseded systems survive within the new ones.
I. ECONOMY OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES
Until the last century it was held that hunting, pastoralism, and agriculture had been for all peoples three stages of economic development succeeding one another. The historico-cultural ethnological school now distinguishes four principal forms of economy: gathering, higher hunting, pastoralism, agriculture. These last three derive, independently and each with its own center of origin, from the first, and from their intercrossing mixed forms arose.
1. The economy of gathering
In the groups that practice it, the men procure food by hunting and fishing; the women and children gather vegetable foods, or animals that are not very mobile, such as worms, insects and their larvae, snails, etc. Exceptionally the man takes part in gathering, when collective and rapid work is necessary, or when it is a matter of climbing trees, e.g. for gathering honey, or for using the axe. To dig up roots and tubers the woman uses a digging stick. For hunting the man uses a weapon: the bow with arrow, the harpoon, the blowgun and traps; as auxiliary means he uses the dog and poisons. For fishing he uses the striking weapon or the throwing weapon, nets, fish traps, snares (among the Indians of the northwest), and also poisons thrown into the waters and poisoned bait. Fishing can in certain places be so abundant as almost to replace the other means of subsistence and can have an important place also in economic systems other than gathering, whereas this is not so with hunting. Every group of a tribe knows well the hunting and gathering resources of its territory in the favorable periods of the year, while in certain other periods prohibitions or taboos are imposed for the protection of game, fish and plants. Hard or easy as this kind of life may prove, the gatherers love it and do not wish to exchange it for any other, although they may have been able to know its advantages, as when, for example, the Andamanese came to know agriculture in their country, through the work of whites.
2. The economy of the higher hunters
It is so called in contrast to that of the gatherers. What in fact characterizes the latter is its being originally familial, whereas the other is tribal and seems proper to totemists. Among these there is in fact a vast economic solidarity, whereby the individual clans and groups exchange, more or less regularly, determined means of subsistence and the tools of labor, such as utensils, weapons, etc. Since the production of implements requires favorable conditions, such as, for example, good raw material, specialization came about: one group found itself in better conditions for forging swords, another daggers, another for producing articles of clothing and ornament. And thus an artisanal differentiation between clan and clan imposed itself. While in the economy of the gatherers there was equality of the sexes with a convenient division of labor, in this economy of the higher hunters the economic importance of the man has increased relative to the woman, with the consequence of an imbalance between the sexes. The great development of the idea of the State with all its divisions and subdivisions of clans with their totem diminished the importance of the family, reduced almost to nothing, with much detriment to the human personality. The economy of the higher hunters would have arisen in the Upper Paleolithic, whereas that of the gatherers in the Lower, or rather in the prelithic or alithic period, if one can conceive of the use of wood without the exploitation of stone.
3. The agricultural economy
It provides the means of sustenance through the cultivation of plants: it is a principally feminine activity; the man, however, takes part in it with the clearing and preparation of the ground for sowing, with the erection, if necessary, of protective hedges around the field, helping with the harvest, building storehouses and similar things, and especially occupying himself with defense against enemies or fierce animals. The most ancient form of cultivation is that done with the digging stick. In tropical regions every three or four months plantings of taro and yam are made, so that one is always provided with ripe tubers, the garden being at different degrees of maturity. There are peoples who abandon the land once it has become sterile, and by burning the forest or the brushwood, prepare cultivation in a different place; other peoples instead leave the land at rest for some years before cultivating it again. To the cultivation of plants is added the planting, done by the men, of fruit trees (mango, date, betel, pandanus). There is no lack of some hunting or fishing expedition done by the men, nor of some gathering excursion done individually or in groups by the women. For the irrigation of the fields canals are dug, which also serve to drain marshes. To this economic system belong the raising of pigs and poultry, the invention of pottery and of textiles. The agricultural economy is originally familial, and since it has a prevalently feminine character, diminishing the economic activity of the man, it has led to the matriarchal system (v. DONNA; MATRIARCATO) and to the rise, since it requires stability of residence, of the village with its solid square houses with saddleback roofs.
4. The pastoral economy
It is held that the transition to the cultivation of plants and to the raising of livestock was one of the milestones of the technical progress of the human race, accomplished in the period of transition from the Lower to the Upper Paleolithic, or in the Neolithic according to others. Pastoralism requires at the beginning the domestication of wild animals and their multiplication in a state of captivity. Today the Turco-Tatar peoples use meat, especially horse meat, as their principal food; indeed they have no other word to indicate food than "meat." The Mongols, the Altaians and the Chinghisi use principally lamb. The reindeer herders (Koryaks, Samoyeds, Ostyaks, Lapps) do not use reindeer meat, except when they lack game, and they use the reindeer for travel and for milk. As milk animals, however, they hold in primary consideration the mare, the cow, the sheep and the goat, secondarily the reindeer, the yak, the she-camel and the she-ass. Milk is abhorred in non-Aryan India, in Indonesia and in eastern Asia. Among many other tribes of eastern Africa devoted to pastoralism, the custom is noted of drinking the blood of cattle and young oxen, opening a vein and drawing one or two liters of blood. Pastoral peoples eat meat and milk cooked; moreover all the peoples of the world use fire and all, except the Andamanese, the Tasmanians and the Bocango (Congo), know how to produce it. The raising of livestock is a markedly masculine activity: the care of the milk vessels, the tanning of hides, the construction of tents, the making of garments, the grinding of grain, the cooking of foods, sometimes the preparation of beer and similar things are left to the women. Since the pastoralists need good pastures for their flocks, nomadism and transhumance are characteristic of them.
5. Economic collaboration
From the union of the agricultural economy with that of the higher hunters there derives, as has already been mentioned, an intense exchange of goods, which leads to the development of industry and commerce, of technique and art, as well as of vast social aggregates, as has been observed, for example, in Melanesia, Australia, America and Africa. Thus among the African farmers are the potters, carpenters and blacksmiths, who often live in a reserved part of the village of the group to which they are attached, and trade their products at the nearest market, bartering them for the means of subsistence (millet, maize, beans) that others have in surplus; or they work on request. Whenever nomadic herders have succeeded in subjugating these mixed peoples, or the farmers, or the higher hunters, the great archaic and pre-archaic empires have arisen from them, with the consequent technical advancement of agriculture and crafts. Animals are then employed in agriculture with the plough, in transport with the traction of two-or four-wheeled carts (already known in the fourth millennium B.C.), while in war the use of war chariots and cavalry appears. The exchange of goods, which among gatherers is rather based on contacts between relatives, gradually leads to the development of routes and means of communication and to the introduction of primitive money. This, however, is used only to facilitate and measure the barter of goods, but not for the purpose of capitalization. There are very rare cases in which primitive money is converted into ownership of livestock, as, for example, happens in Buin in Bougainville (Solomon archipelago).
6. Origins of different economic systems
Ethnology has proved that the man of the most primitive culture (the gatherer) is no different from all others of every time and every place. The most authoritative prehistorians affirm that even the tools of the earliest period of the Pleistocene attest to the full rationality and therefore the spirituality of primordial man.
The other economic systems — higher hunting, pastoralism, agriculture — derive independently from gathering during the transition period that runs from the Lower to the Upper Palaeolithic.
Hahn, followed by others, holds that the breeding of livestock began for magico-religious reasons in the pre-Sumerian agricultural civilization, where it was then used for ploughing, and from where it passed at a later time to other peoples, while agriculture would have been born in Mesopotamia. Recently Father Hermanna and Wolfel, independently, have sought to demonstrate that pastoralism began with the sheep and the goat; then the ox was domesticated and with it the donkey, the onager, the camel; then the horse and the reindeer, not by the proto-Samoyed and proto-Altaic hunters, but by a hunting people of western Asia between Turan and Iran. From here pastoralism radiated into Mesopotamia, into anterior Asia and into Egypt, then into Africa and into Europe, then into India, at Mohenjo Daro, among the Toda, and finally into central Asia and eastern Asia, where the ox arrived, but not the horse.
Bibliography20 works
Luigi Vannicelli
II. ECONOMY OF THE ANCIENT ADVANCED PEOPLES. — Once the phase of primitive economy was surpassed, the most impor-
tant economic systems of antiquity were those of ancient Egypt, of Greece and of the Hellenistic monarchies, of ancient Rome.
1. The economic system of ancient Egypt
It develops in the millennium that comprises the six finished and Memphite dynasties (from 3200 B.C. to 2275 B.C.). The religious presupposition of this system was the consideration of the power of the pharaohs as a direct transmission of the power of the gods. The consequence of the religious essence of the monarchy in the political field was absolutism, and in the economic-administrative field the tendency toward centralization and voluntarism. This tendency was accentuated by geographical conditions (v. BerrTO): given the particular importance of the periodic inundations of the Nile for agriculture and given the relative isolation of the country, the intervention of the State was facilitated, since it alone could first carry out the great works to regulate the waters, then the great religious and state constructions that balanced the scarcity of commercial activity.
The two pivots of the productive structure of ancient Egypt are: agriculture, practised predominantly in individualistic form by small landowners who live on the product of their land, paying the State direct taxes in kind and in days of labour on the vast estates of the pharaoh or of the temples; industrial activity, exercised predominantly in monopolistic form by the State. Monopolies of the State are the mines, the quarries, the building enterprises for public constructions (pyramids, temples), the factories, where the products of the state lands and those obtained from taxes in kind are transformed into manufactured goods. For the account of the State there work, besides slaves, limited to prisoners of war, free labourers hired by contract. The administration of the economic activities of the State is entrusted to officials. Internal exchanges are limited and take the form of barter; external ones, also of little intensity, have Syria and Palestine as their directions and are a monopoly of the State. The high productivity of free agricultural labour and the strong monopolistic profits of the State allow the economic system to sustain the great unproductive expenses of public constructions, but the disproportionate extension of these expenses in the end affects the productivity of agriculture and is one of the causes of decline. Other causes are: the concentration of wealth in the hands of officials whose office, after the fourth dynasty, became hereditary; the transformation of free agricultural labourers into coloni legally bound to the soil; the formation of fiscal privileges in favour of large properties. After the sixth dynasty the Egyptian economic system, through a slow process of involution, loses its characteristics.
2. The economic systems of ancient Greece and of the Hellenistic monarchies
They developed from the 7th to the 3rd century B.C. The geographical conditions of Greece ([v.] limited arable land with a greatly extended coastline) and the political ones (the consolidation of the city-state and the tendency toward colonial expansion) favored intensive agriculture (viticulture, olive growing, orchards); the exchange of foodstuffs, supplied by foreign peoples and by the colonies, for manufactured goods produced in the city-state; the necessity, and therefore the development, of maritime transport and commerce. The legal order and the productive structure were notably different from city to city. Hereditary succession was permitted everywhere, with legal limitations tending to eliminate both the concentration and the fragmentation of property, not so much for economic reasons as for political and moral ones. The forms of managing the agricultural enterprise were likewise varied. In the Greek economic system, however, agriculture and stock raising constituted a secondary source of wealth. More developed was small-scale industry producing for the market. The labor force was supplied predominantly by slaves belonging to the owner of the enterprise or entrusted to him. In the democratic cities, and especially in Athens, there was also no lack of free wage-earners, both citizens and foreigners.
The commercial technique of the Greeks reached a perfection that would not be surpassed until the advent of the modern capitalist system. Besides spreading coinage as an intermediary of exchanges, the Greeks established genuine monetary agreements among the various city-states and between cities and colonies. In the period of the apogee of the Greek economic system (5th and 4th centuries B.C.), since money had become the principal form of income and accumulation, the need was felt not to leave it unproductive, and lending spread, regulated by precise legal norms and carried out by specialized merchants.
With the conquests of Alexander the Great, the urban way of life, individualism, the spirit of initiative, and the developed industrial and commercial technique of the Greeks were grafted onto Oriental absolutism, giving rise to the characteristic economic system of the Hellenistic monarchies. In it the State monopoly is greatly widespread. The largest landed properties belong directly to the State, and on the small and medium properties ceded to private individuals the State reserves considerable rights (military service of the colonists, taxes, services). Highly specialized industrial activity is carried on in predominantly State-owned factories, with slave labor or free labor hired by contract. Handicraft also survives, organized in trade associations; its production, however, is minutely regulated by State laws (those of Ptolemy in Egypt for the production of oil and papyrus are well known), and authorization to practice a trade is subject to the payment of a tax. The economic system of the Hellenistic monarchies declined when, productivity having diminished because of the concentration of wealth and the impoverishment of the artisan classes and of free workers, State intervention was transformed into indiscriminate and oppressive fiscalism.
3. The economic system of ancient Rome
It developed in the imperial era, from Octavian Augustus (63 B.C.) to Constantine (337 A.D.). Political unity, the numerous urban population, and the security of land and sea traffic led to a harmonious development of the three productive activities: agriculture, industry, and commerce, favored by the relatively decentralized administrative structure and by the prevailing liberalism. The State's interventions in the economy, limited to the fiscal and the welfare fields, were empirical and subordinate to political interests. The legal order, which with the Corpus iuris civilis reached a perfection unknown to previous civilizations, was centered on the recognition and protection of immovable and movable property (including slaves) and of the rights of the individual. The ager romanus first and the ager italicus afterward were susceptible of full or quiritary ownership and exempt from tax. Provincial lands, assigned to colonists or to veterans or left to the former owners, were burdened with land taxes that sanctioned Rome's theoretical right of ownership. The small peasant property, directly worked and producing for the consumption of the tenant family, characteristic of the republican age, underwent a continuous process of concentration, favored by the influx of capital, slaves, and livestock as a consequence of military conquests. From this followed that separation between ownership and working of the land and between production and consumption of agricultural products which characterizes the Roman economic system and, since agriculture constituted the principal source of wealth, justifies in the view of some authors, despite the lack of rationalization of the system for profit and the predominance of politics over economics, the designation "agrarian capitalism." The redistribution of lands to veterans in the imperial period did not change the system, inasmuch as it did not create new peasant holdings but new rural estates (latifundia) belonging to rich urban possessors, based on slave labor and producing for the market. Agricultural products found their counterpart in manufactured industrial goods, whose exchange, extended not only to luxury goods but also to those of primary necessity, was facilitated by the good road network, the unified monetary system, the legislative protection of contracts, and the existence of interest-bearing loans.
Commerce was an important source of wealth, but its gains were predominantly invested in the purchase of land. Industry was decentralized and carried on in the form of small artisan enterprises with the aid of servile labor; technically it was little advanced and did not reach the level of Greek and Hellenistic industry.
With the end of military conquests, the concentration of landed wealth, the low productivity of industry, whose development was halted by the narrowing of the market due to the general poverty of the mass of consumers, and the increase in the fiscal burden, which the traditional taxes could not meet, imparted to the economic system a movement of decline. The administrative structure likewise changed: the State resorted to extraordinary taxes in kind and in labor (liturgies), for whose collection the wealthy citizen bourgeoisie were made responsible, first collectively and then individually. Under Diocletian and Constantine, State interventions intensified (price controls, facilities for the purchase of tools by small colonists, etc.), but their lack of systematic character rendered them ineffective.
III. MEDIEVAL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
They are the feudal economy and the city economy.
1. The feudal economy (v. FEUDALISM). — It runs from the 9th century to the 11th century and has as its presuppositions the formation of the conservative and particularistic feudal society and the continuous decrease in population density. Real property is concentrated in the hands of the feudal lords, who cultivate it extensively and without profit motive. The serfs work the land either on the lord's account or on their own: in the latter case they pay the lord a rent and a share of the harvest. Other economic-fiscal rights of the feudal lord are: the collection of tolls; the right to the so-called banalities (the serf's obligation to use exclusively and for payment the lord's oven, mill, and oil press), the right to succeed a colonist who dies without children, the exclusive right of hunting and fishing, etc. Since the fiscal system is based exclusively on taxes in kind and on services, that is, it is tied to the number and stability of the serfs on the estate, various limits are imposed on the mobility of the population (prohibition on leaving the estate, prohibition on marrying a person from outside the fief, etc.). Industrial production for the market does not exist: manufactured goods of primary necessity come from artisans who produce to order or, for the most part, are the product of home processing. From this derives a very limited commerce carried on by itinerant merchants, laboriously organized into periodic fairs. Monetary circulation is very scant and does not permit the formation of movable wealth. The entire feudal economy is an anticommercial economy, without risks and therefore tending to be static.
2. The city economy (from the 11th century to the 15th century)
It develops with the rebirth of urban life and with the formation of the Commune with a democratic structure. A notable influence on its formation is exercised by the Crusades (v.), which broke the static nature of the feudal economy, opening the markets of the Levant and mobilizing men and capital. The ownership and exploitation of the land are fragmented: productivity is notably increased by the influx of capital and by the spread of rational systems of irrigation and drainage. The autarkic economic policy of the Communes favors the rise of new industries; production retains its artisan character, but the new category of merchant-entrepreneurs is formed, who organize the activity of several artisans, supplying capital and raw materials and assuming the risks of production for the market.
A characteristic of the city economy is the formation of the Guilds and Corporations (v.). From a free professional association, with membership having become obligatory, the corporation takes on the character of a professional monopoly. Exchanges, both interregional and international, are very active; monetary circulation is abundant, but insufficient for the needs of exchange, which credit largely provides for. In this period, while the prohibition of usury (v.) remains in force, legitimate grounds are recognized for the payment of an indemnity to the lender (actual loss, lost profit, risk, etc.). The activity of the Florentine and Flemish bankers gives rise to a developed technique of credit. The fiscal system of the cities is based on indirect taxes as ordinary revenues; on direct taxes, public loans, and monetary devaluation, as extraordinary revenues.
IV. THE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS OF THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AGE
1. The mercantilist economic system (v. MERCANTILISM). — It manifests itself in a more or less organic form in all European states from the 16th century to the end of the 18th, but reaches its greatest development in France and England in the 17th century. Its premises are provided by the practical necessity of the recently formed unitary states to have at their disposal constant, secure and substantial revenues to meet their needs (expenses of organization, administration, military, etc.). The mercantilist system gives rise to a series of interventions by the State, aimed at increasing national wealth, of which money is considered the expression and measure. It unfolds in three phases. In the first, interventions are limited to prohibiting the export of coin. In the second phase, interventions tend to increase the quantity of money within the country, through the control of individual foreign trade contracts. In the third phase, which corresponds to the maximum development of the system, the State aims to influence the balance of trade indirectly, by creating in the country conditions favorable to the exportation and unfavorable to the importation of finished products (v. MERCANTILISM; CROMWELL, OLIVER). The mercantilist economic system favored the transition from the town economy to modern capitalism, from which it differs by its accentuated voluntarism, that is, by its confidence in an economic well-being that is not spontaneous but achievable through the preordained intervention of authority.
2. The capitalist economic system (v. CAPITALISM)
The premise of the system is "liberalism" (v.), which the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789) had affirmed in politics, and which the physiocrats (v.) first and the classical school (v. SMITH, ADAMS) afterward had affirmed in economics, with confidence in a beneficial and spontaneous economic order. Its technical characteristics are: the renewal of agricultural technique with the introduction of four-field rotation and artificial fertilization; the renewal of industrial technique with the increasing introduction of machines; the renewal of the technique of land transport with the creation of railway lines, and of maritime transport with steamships.
The consequences of the changed ideological and technical situation are: the separation of capital (v.) from labor, so that it passes into the hands of the entrepreneur who organizes production, appearing on the market as seller of the product and as buyer of raw materials and of labor, which is considered a commodity; the employment of fixed capital in increasing measure and in a proportion greater than that of circulating capital; the division and rationalization of labor; the search for an ever wider market and the continuous transformations of the combination of the factors of production and of the dimensions of the firm in order to adapt them to the qualitative and quantitative variations of the market itself; the highly developed monetary economy to facilitate the formation and distribution of savings; the prevalence of collective enterprises over individual ones and therefore the separation of ownership (shareholders) from management (directors) of the enterprise; the proletarianization of the working class which, although a necessary cooperator with capital in production, is an antagonist of capital itself in the distribution of the product, and the consequent class struggle. The capitalist economic system presents very complex characteristics that are difficult to schematize, because of the dynamism inherent in the system itself. Its development may be considered as divided into three periods.
The first (in the economically most advanced countries it runs from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th) is the period of the transformation of agricultural and industrial technique; of the predominance of the private initiative of the owner-entrepreneur; of the formation of class consciousness among the workers abandoned to themselves in a labor market unfavorable to them because of their lesser contractual bargaining power, because of the competition of female and child labor, and because of the deficiency of organization and legal protection.
The second period (to the middle of the 19th century) is characterized by the predominance of the speculative-financial element over the industrial one; by the development of large enterprises and by the struggle for the conquest of international markets. Trade-union organizations grow stronger and the wage is determined through collective bargaining. The State intervenes in social relations with laws on the physical protection of the worker and on the duration of work. It is in this period that the deficiencies of the system appear in all their evidence: the periodic recurrence of depressions with consequent mass unemployment and inequality in the distribution of wealth.
The third period (from the end of the 19th century to the First World War) is characterized by agreements among large enterprises to pass from a regime of competition to one of coalition (or quasi-monopoly). The enterprises, incapable of reacting to variations in demand with corresponding variations in supply because of high fixed costs and the relative rigidity of wages, renounce in part their own individuality and freedom of initiative in order to come to agreements with other enterprises, forming groups, cartels or national and international trusts. The enterprises that have come to agreements pursue a monopolistic price policy. In this period the vast social legislation and the collective bargaining of wages cause the relations between employers and workers to assume a semi-public character, without however attenuating their separation and antagonism.
3. The collectivist economic system
It was implemented in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). The philosophical premise of the system is the historical materialism (v.) of C. Marx; the political premise is the contemporaneous realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the abolition of social classes, of property and of private initiative (v. BOLSHEVISM).
4. The system of regulated economy (or programmatic or partially planned)
It asserts itself in a more or less definite form in all states, with the exception of the U.S.S.R., from the end of the First World War to the present. It consists in a direct and ever more extensive intervention of the State in economic life, in order to modify the results of the economic actions of individuals and to coordinate individual ends with social ends. In the present phase of development of the regulated economy, social ends, theoretically indicated in the achievement of social justice, take concrete form in the tendency toward full employment and the more equitable distribution of wealth. The system of regulated economy recognizes property and private initiative, but subjects them to legal limits (expropriation, collective reserves, etc.) and economic limits (control of investments, nationalization, control of trade, etc.). The premises of the system of regulated economy are to be sought: 1) in the new structure of the market for products and for the factors of production, which has passed from a market of competition to a market of coalition; 2) in the incapacity of the capitalist system to overcome its deficiencies: economic cycles and maldistribution of wealth; 3) in the changed conception of the relations between the State and the economy, with the insertion, among the essential functions of the State, of the achievement of social justice.
State interventions that bring about a regulated economy vary from State to State, in order to adapt to the different pre-existing economic situations. They can be grouped into: monetary-policy interventions: manipulation of the discount rate, privileged credits, etc.; international-trade-policy interventions: bilateral and plurilateral agreements, exchange controls, protective tariffs, export bounties, etc.; social-policy interventions: social legislation and insurance, vocational guidance and selection, etc.; direct interventions in production: nationalization of key industries, public works, fixing of prices above (e.g., the United States Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1931) or below (e.g., so-called political prices) the market price, etc.; business-cycle-policy interventions, aimed at preventing expansions (credit control, limits on the self-financing of firms, etc.) or at lifting depressions (public works, increase in the money supply, etc.).
Such interventions taken separately are proper to any economic system, but in a regulated economy they take on particular importance, because they are preordained and coordinated with one another with a view to the attainment of a single economic and social goal. The regulated economy brings profound changes to the fiscal system with the introduction of the State's economic budget, that is, of a budget framed on criteria that are not exclusively financial, and to the administrative structure of the State, with the creation of new bodies (Ministries of the Budget or of Production, Higher Councils of the Economy, etc.) or with the broadening of the functions of already existing bodies. Particular forms of regulated economy are: the corporative economic system, implemented by the Fascist regime in Italy (v. CORPORAZIONI), and the British Labour economic system (v. LABURISMO). The regulated economy raises the problem of the relations between individual freedom and the authority of the State.
Once autonomism in international economic relations has been abandoned — an autonomism proper to the gold-exchange system, a system incompatible with the attainment of full employment and social security and therefore with the regulated economy — the regulation of those same relations is inconceivable except on common and organic criteria among the various States; therefore the regulated economy also raises the problem of international cooperation, of which examples are the European Payments Union (E.P.U.), the Customs Unions, etc.