Ecota

Ecota

The Economic Cooperation Organization or ECO is an Asian political and economic intergovernmental organization that was founded in 1985 in Tehran by the leaders of Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. It provides a platform to discuss ways to improve development and promote trade and investment opportunities. The ECO is an ad hoc organisation under the United Nations Charter. The objective is to establish a single market for goods and services, much like the European Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ECO expanded to include Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in 1992. The current framework of the ECO expresses itself mostly in the form of bilateral agreements and arbitration mechanisms between individual and fully sovereign member states. That makes the ECO similar to ASEAN in that it is an organisation that has its own offices and bureaucracy for implementation of trade amongst sovereign member states. This consists of the historically integrated agricultural region of the Ferghana Valley which allows for trade and common agricultural production in the border region between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has free trade agreements with both Afghanistan and Iran which are in the process of implementation. In 2017, a free trade agreement between Turkey and Iran was proposed to be signed in the future, in addition to a proposed Pakistan-Turkey Free Trade Agreement. The Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement is designed to facilitate trade for goods and services for Central Asia via both Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is in addition to the Ashgabat agreement, which is a multi-modal transport agreement between the Central Asian states. Further cooperation amongst members is planned in the form of the Iran–Pakistan gas pipeline, as well as a Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan pipeline. Current pipelines include the Tabriz–Ankara pipeline in addition to the planned Persian Pipeline. This is in addition to the transportation of oil and gas from Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to supply the industrialisation underway in Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and beyond. Pakistan plans to diversify its source of oil and gas supplies towards the Central Asian states including petroleum import contracts with Azerbaijan.The ECO's secretariat and cultural department are in Iran, its economic bureau is in Turkey, and its scientific bureau is in Pakistan.

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