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The growth in intra-regional has been one of the dominant features of the world economy in the last decades. Statistical indicators which are commonly used in order to measure this phenomenon are inadequate to evaluate its dynamics, as well as to compare different regions. This paper reviews the analytical limitations of available statistical tools, and proposes some new indicators, experimenting their application to data concerning the four main regional integration areas (ASEAN, EU, MERCOSUR and NAFTA) in the period 1990-2000. In particular, a trade introversion is proposed, which seems able to surmount all the main shortcomings of traditional measures of intra-regional intensity, and can be interpreted as an indicator of revealed preferences among the region's members. Trade introversion indices can be complemented with indicators of relative openness, which are based on the trade-to-GDP ratio and reflect the internal and external trade-creating effects of regional integration. Combining measures of intra-regional intensity and relative openness allows to build an index of infra-regional propensity, which can be related to the logic of gravity models of international flows. All the four regions considered in this paper experienced a moderate upward trend in introversion in the nineties. The level of the index for MERCOSUR was much higher than for the other regions. ASEAN was the region with the highest degree of relative openness, whilst both MERCOSUR and NAFTA were well below the world average. The combination of these different factors explains why ASEAN and MERCOSUR were the regions with the highest intraregional propensity.
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