Integrate the Region — Sequencing Maritima's Single-Market Accession

A four-round, advanced economic-policy simulation set inside the Maritima National Economic Council (MNEC), the inter-ministerial body of the fictional Republic of Maritima — a 58-million-person, middle-income ASEAN-style archipelagic economy (GDP MRD 480 billion; exports MRD 168 billion, 35% of GDP) and the deepening bloc's 'median economy', the swing vote on every integration protocol. The bloc has ratified an accelerated single-market roadmap — tariff elimination on the remaining sensitive lists, mutual recognition of professional qualifications and free movement of skilled labour, all phased over a binding 36 months — and Maritima's adjustment math does not close. Playing the Chief Economic Advisor, the learner must sequence the integration across four KPIs that pull against each other: trade gains, the employment effect, a regional competitiveness index that the Prime Minister's mandate forbids from falling below 60 (it starts at 62), and the fiscal cost of replacing MRD 2.1 billion/year in tariff revenue. Round 1 — Diagnose: classify eight sectors offensive/defensive/transformational using revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and adjustment cost, identify the sharpest gains-versus-jobs tension (electronics is the offensive engine at 28% of exports; garments, 310,000 jobs, are defensive), and frame the bloc's 'full and immediate' schedule as a net-welfare baseline to beat rather than a target to chase. Round 2 — Plan: set the tariff-elimination phasing (immediate, sequenced, or all-to-36-months), the labour-mobility regime (full mutual recognition, recognition-with-retention, or staged), and confirm the schedule meets the bloc minimum to keep MRD 3.4 billion in co-financing and the rule-setting seat. Round 3 — Decide: allocate the MRD 9.6 billion development fund (a hard ceiling, against MRD 14–18 billion of credible need) across five competing claims — retraining and wage-insurance, rural cross-subsidy to replace lost tariff revenue, talent-retention against brain drain, SME productivity grants, and trade-facilitation infrastructure — prioritizing rather than dividing into equal slices. Round 4 — Recover & Defend: respond to a mid-transition dumping shock that dips the index to 60.4 with a permitted safeguard and fund reallocation without forfeiting co-financing, then defend the schedule on all four KPIs to a skeptical bloc Secretariat. The math rewards correct comparative-advantage reads, sequenced phasing, recognition paired with retention, prioritized funding, and a held competitiveness floor — and uses sticky, run-defining penalty flags to punish the five classic errors so none can reach the top verdict: speed over sequence (breaching the 60 floor kills the schedule), reflexive protectionism (forfeiting the seat), one-sided labour math (brain drain), equal-slice budgeting (no claim clears its threshold) and ignoring the fisc (an unfunded structural hole). Built on Macaranas's ASEAN regional-integration framing and AEC single-market logic, it teaches that integration is a distribution-and-timing problem, not a speed contest.