"A clear, well-written, and comprehensive statement of a number of salient issues involving North American free trade--summarized and referenced to more detailed source material for the interested reader."
--Clark W. Reynolds, Stanford University

"A first-rate piece of work . . . Its great value is that it will be used for some time as a reference document by experts who will want to delve more deeply into the specifics of the many technical issues covered."
--Sidney Weintraub, University of Texas, Austin

Negotiations toward a North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) began in June 1991. This book assesses both the substances and the form of a prospective NAFTA. Part One examines the objectives of the United States, Mexico, and Canada in the NAFTA negotiations; the potential shape and contents of the agreement (including dispute-settlement and institutional issues); its possible extension to third countries; and its implications for multilateral trade negotiations and the GATT.

Part Two examines the broad economic implications of a NAFTA for trade, investment, and employment; labor and environmental concerns that arise because of Mexico's lower level of economic development; and the cross-sectional issues of rules of origin and intellectual property.

Part Three analyzes how the energy, auto, steel, textile, agricultural, and financial services sectors of the Mexican economy could be affected by a NAFTA, and the implications for U.S. and Canadian industries. Part Four summarizes the major conclusions and policy recommendations.

This book encapsulates the 'New Normal Policy' which has changed the regional policy between China and the African continent. This volume emphasises China's role in Africa as a collaborator in an attempt to fulfil the Beijing consensus in emerging countries. The contextual research encompasses how one can comprehend the influence of the Chinese model in Africa and her diplomatic relations with the continent. China and Africa: A New Paradigm of Global Business endeavours to define whether or not the Washington model has become weathered, and the Beijing consensus more relevant in this specific continent.

This book demonstrates how human rights instruments and values have brought different movements together in the struggle against free trade under the banners of state duty and law enforcement with their underlying principles of equality and human dignity. Special emphasis is placed on how subjectivities influence identification with certain values and legal or political strategies. Furthermore, by focusing on the understanding of human rights by social agents the book also shows that specific human rights have more political potential for certain types of subjects in the struggle against free trade than others, such as the right to development, the rights of women and the right to food. This analysis is conducted with a specifically Latin American theorization of human rights that challenges both Eurocentric scholarly works on the issue and the arguments of European activists directed at the allegedly Western authorship of human rights discourses.

With the increasing integration of the major economies of the world, trade frictions have also increased. The Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, once scheduled for completion in December 1990, has been slowed over the issue of agricultural subsidies. The U.S.-Japanese trade relations have continued to be a source of friction between the two countries. At issue in all these disputes is whether the United States and other countries are playing ""fairly"" in the international trade arena.The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) outlines a variety of rules designed to ensure fairness. The United States, like other GATT signatories, has enacted statutes designed, for the most part, to be consistent with the GATT requirements. In this book, Richard Boltuck and Robert E. Litan, joined by a team of attorneys and economists with direct experience in ""unfair trade"" practice investigations, provide the first study of how one of the U.S. governmental agencies charged with implementing the U.S. laws governing unfair trade the Department of Commerce has actually discharged its statutory mission. In particular, the book focuses on the antidumping and countervailing duty statutes, provisions allowing the United States to impose offsetting duties on imports that are sold here at prices below those charged by the producers in their home countries that benefit from subsidies provided by foreign governments to encourage exports. Although these provisions may have once been obscure parts of the U.S. trade laws, they have figured importantly in many recent celebrated trade disputes, including those involving the import of foreign-made semiconductors, steel, lumber, screen displays for laptop computers, word processors, and minivan vehicles. All but one of the authors in the volume are highly critical of the procedures used by the Department of Commerce to calculate margins of dumping and export subsidization. Specifically, they find that at many points in the investigations, both through substantive and procedural requirements, there is a bias toward higher margins, and therefore higher import duties, than is warranted by economic theory; and in some cases by the GATT antidumping and subsidy codes themselves. Significantly, these authors contend that most of the biases can be removed without legislative change, but rather through changes in administrative practice.

Service activities such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, business auditing, distribution, trading, and other services have been at the forefront of the transformation process in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. These reforms, though far from complete, are now sufficiently advanced to draw lessons and to identify strategic options for foreign service firms expanding in the region. In this volume, leading analysts and practitioners offer an appraisal of the service markets and the challenges related to foreign entry into the services sector in Central and Eastern Europe during the "second wave" of transformation. What is the emerging pattern of change? What is the outlook for promising business in the area of services? Which entry strategies have proven particularly successful? How do the leading service providers from the West deal with the challenges confronting them in service markets of the region?

This collective volume used case studies, field research and industry studies to consider strategic options for foreign service firms in East Central and Eastern Europe for the late nineties and beyond.

s countries around the globe were rediscovering political freedom, speakers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas' fourth annual South A west Conference called for greater economic freedom-free trade in markets free of artificial barriers and misguided regulations, free trade through out a continent (perhaps a hemisphere) that has discarded unnecessary restraints and is poised to emerge as a preeminent competitive force in the 21st century. The Dallas Fed conference, titled "Beyond the Border: Expanding Trade for Prosperity" and held October 24-25, 1992, brought together several hundred participants interested in the possibility of free trade throughout North America and beyond. "How far south can we go?" conference speaker Javier Murcio asked. His answer: "As far as economic reform takes hold. " Around the globe, countries were becoming engulfed in what Henry an "absolute prairie fIre of democracy. " And one of the fIrst Cisneros called places many nations were attempting to exercise this new-found political freedom was in the marketplace. As Richard Fisher put it: " . . . market capitalism is a universally accepted dogma. " "This world . . . is becoming one interdependent marketplace. State and national boundaries have become meaningless. No longer are there such things as domestic or foreign fIrms. Decisionmakers can be anywhere they wish to be because computerization and telecommunications allow people to be every where at once," Fisher said."

Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment, and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice, and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people's ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

This book answers the recently topical questions of how China's processed trade affects the trade of Southeast Asia. What is Southeast Asia's role in Factory Asia, the region's complex of cross-border supply chains? What is Southeast Asia's involvement in building or joining production networks in the region? And, most important, how can Southeast Asia increase the value added of its products and improve its competitiveness? This book provides rigorous analysis of how trade policy affects value added, highly disaggregated at the firm and product level, of the six Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Viet Nam - and combines this with thorough examinations of their trade, industrial and labour policies.

The institutional and legal status of the WTO, with its integrated dispute settlement system, provides a framework for certainty, security and stability for trade as well as a coherent system to protect intellectual property rights. In all member countries and their respective enterprises, WTO regulations need to be considered when designing and implementing trade-related strategies for business operations in the integrated global market.

This book aims at giving upper-level undergraduates and graduate students a comprehensive understanding of the public regulations related to international trade within the WTO mechanism and equip them, as potential policy makers and future practitioners in international trade, with the practical skills to interpret and apply the multilateral trade regulations as outlined by the WTO."

High technology research laboratories are under constant pressure from the governments that support them to generate secondary utilities such as technology transfer and spin-offs. As buyers, such organisations are often used by governments to stimulate innovation by their suppliers, under tight budgetary constraints and within the rigid institutional frameworks applied to public research organisations. This book addresses the design of efficient buyer-supplier contracts within the institutional boundaries faced by the buyer and focuses in particular on vertical buyer-supplier linkages as a source of supplier core competencies in a cost- and technology-driven environment.
Based on a study of manufacturing contracts commissioned by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the book aims to answer two questions. First, what is the most efficient governance structure for organising buyer-supplier relationships, given the presence of specific institutional boundaries, high technological complexity and environmental uncertainty? Secondly, irrespective of the presence of such an efficient governance structure, what type of impact could technology-oriented government contracts have on supplier core competencies?

This book is a collection of timely and detailed articles on the North American Free Trade Agreement written by experts in the field who examine the Canadian, US and Mexican points of view. The scholars provide an overview as well as their insights of how NAFTA impacts on macroeconomic issues, national perspectives and bilateral issues, cross-border and industry-specific issues and the environment. This book serves as an excellent primary source of information on many of the significant aspects of NAFTA.

Emerging trade blocs in North America and the European Community are altering the global economy and Japan's place in it. This book asks: will trade blocs be trade diverting or create new opportunities for Japanese trade and investment?; will a new Asian-Pacific trade bloc emerge in response to this challenge?; and how will the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of China as an economic power affect Japan's approach to trade blocs in its two most lucrative markets?

An inside view of the forces which shaped SEPA and the PSD written from the unique perspective of someone closely involved throughout the process. It uncovers the strategic, legal and practical implications of the full harmonization agenda and provides an assessment of where these initiatives stand today, including key lessons learned.

The papers in this collection give an overview of the latest work in international trade theory. The contributors include many of the most innovative contemporary theorists, and they provide an unrivaled introduction to the latest developments in one of the most dynamic subfields of economics. Distinctive features of the book include a section on the role of historical and geographical considerations in international trade; an emphasis on dynamic aspects of trade; and an assessment of the work of Ronald Jones, in whose honor the book is published.

Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award An Economist Book of the Year The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they have come from. But we should. The World for Sale lifts the lid on one of the least scrutinized corners of the world economy: the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard, and sell the earth's resources. It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets, enabling an enormous expansion in international trade and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centers. The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

Publisher description: The author examines the United States and European Union's use of anti-dumping laws to demonstrate that discriminatory treatment persists even a decade after the end of the Cold War. She argues that lingering Cold War beliefs about the trade threat posed by Communist countries continue to affect the method of implementing these trade remedy laws.

Companies succeed in international markets because of their competitive competence which, in large measure, is based on the level of knowledge and skill they bring to their international marketing activities. Public organizations in the export development and promotion field play a facilitating role in this process. Their mandate is to enhance the know-how of exporters and thereby assist foreign market entry, development and expansion. The interaction between these public organizations and the companies they exist to serve is the subject of this book. The book is wide-ranging and up-to-date. The work ofresearchers from 11 countries (in both the developed and developing world) is represented which means that a variety of perspectives are contained in the book. These contributions present the latest thinking on this important matter. The authors of each chapter are objective in their approach. Consequently, considerable attention is paid to the performance of the public organization support programs and activities. Each researcher comes to his/her own conclusions based on the individual work undertaken, but readers will fmd that certain common themes run through many ofthe chapters. The key objectives of the book are: 1. To provide academic researchers with a current and comprehensive treatment of the role played by public organizations in export development and promotion. 2. To expose professional readers (officials in relevant public organizations, consultants in the private sector or in international agencies) to a view of their field of interest that might be broader and more critical than normal.

In March 1998 professional colleagues and students of T.N. Srinivasan joined together at the Festschrift Conference at Yale to honor his work. The book contains nineteen of the contributions which were presented, reflecting the four closely related dimensions of trade and development.

Part I deals with the various dimensions of the issue of growth with particular emphasis on technology choice as well as saving and fertility behavior in Ramsey-type models. Part II moves into the more applied issues of International trade, including the impact of North-South trade on Northern wages, the reasons for the failure of pegged exchange rates in the South, as well as the pros and cons of regional vs. multilateral trading arrangements. Part III presents a variety of theoretical and applied approaches to analyze Indian planning and development experience. The final section, Part IV, addresses the general topic of market failures and economic structure.

This book contains papers by an array of eminent economists and contains a good blend of theory and applied work. Professional economists, policy makers in developing and donor countries and personnel of international organizations will find this a useful tool.

Analysing the experience of developing countries in recent years and the deadlock in trade negotiation in WTO, the author argues that the theories and practices of trade and industrial policies are surrounded by a number of fallacies: that universal and across-the-board trade liberalisation is to the benefit of all developing countries, irrespective of their level of development; that the Invisible Hand of free market alone is conducive to industrialisation, that the infant industry argument is against export expansion; that developed countries industrialised without government intervention; that WTO rules are conducive to development.

Protectionism is a major concern in the international trading community. The question that arises is how the emergence of protectionism can be prevented and whether regional trade arrangements are a suitable mechanism to enforce liberal trade policies. This book examines these issues, concluding that the success of regional trading arrangements in enforcing good trade policies depends on the quality of the regional agreement and its implementation--simple free trade area is unlikely to be sustainable in the long-run without firm commitments of members to deeper integration.

The book examines the expansion of investment and trade between China and New Zealand, and its changing composition within the political framework, especially the 2008 Free Trade Agreement. Particular attention is paid to China's volatile agrifood market, where New Zealand dairy products play an important role for both countries. The New Zealand-China economic relationship - asymmetrical and complementary, but with increasing competition from domestic production - is a case study of the complexities of globalization and the interplay of economic imperatives, political pressures and cultural factors. China is now New Zealand's main economic partner and a major source of migrants, tourists and students. This proposed study on how New Zealand and China manage their grave dissimilarities and disparities in growing, ever close economic ties will be of interest to academics, policy analysts, economic/trade decision makers, and business practitioners.

U.S. firms doing business in Germany are succeeding far better than usually reported. Indeed, 14 of the top 1,700 American companies with direct investment in Germany placed among the top 100 German industrial firms in sales in 1994, a fact that made big news in Germany but was never mentioned in the U.S. press. Here now, in one succinct, readable volume, is all of the vital information that American companies, and companies elsewhere, will need to enter and succeed in this lucrative German market. Certainly there are drawbacks, but attorneys James A. Hart and Dieter Schultze-Zeu make clear there are significant advantages as well, and in certain important ways it may be even easier to do business there than in other major industrial countries such as Japan.

The authors look carefully at the scope of U.S.-German business, and then compare the three economic superpowers -- Germany, Japan, and the United States -- in terms of such variables as gross domestic product, economic growth, and industrial production. They review the political, economic, and social considerations that have emerged from the unification of West and East Germany, and show their effects on the ways in which business in Germany is now done. They examine the principle methods of selling to Germany, the impact of the German government and legal system on American businesses. Then they discuss in detail specifics such as the legal forms of business, Germany's accounting and tax laws, and laws relating to product liability, anti-trust, labor, and social security. Also covered are the German banking and accounting systems, stock markets, and the presence of U.S. commercial banks in Germany. Of special interest are case histories of several important U.S. companies doing business there. An exceptionally useful guide for corporate executives, attorneys, and a cogent introduction to the German business environment for students, researchers, and analysts in the academic community.

In about 40 years, Hong Kong has, against all odds, developed from a relatively obscure entrepot into a thriving industrial and financial economy of world renown. While such a complete metamorphosis constitutes an intriguing story, what of its future? Challenges of creeping, if not steadily proliferating, mercantilist forces and changing international division of labour aside, the capitalist city-economy of Hong Kong is now faced with the problem of changing governance. In all conscience, the future of Hong Kong, especially its post-1997 destiny as a free-market economy, as many have argued, hangs in the balance.;Focusing on relationships concerning trade in manufactures, industrial restructuring and economic development against a background of data, this book offers an examination of the evolution and characteristics of Hong Kong's postwar economy in a historical and comparative perspective, its symbiotic connection with South China in the light of China's open-door policy since late 1970s, as well as a thoughtful assessment of its current turning point.; Despite its emphasis on the economy of Hong Kong, this book has a broader objective - to contribute to the debate on alternative

American Supporters of free trade are on the defensive. Record U.S. trade deficits are fueling demands from industry, Congress, and the public for tariffs, import quotas, and other protectionist measures that could reverse America's long-standing commitment to open markets and sacrifice much of the economic progress experienced in recent years. In Saving Free Trade: A Pragmatic Approach, Robert Z. Lawrence and Robert E. Litan analyze both the allure of protectionism and the problems associated with free trade, proposing reasonable, cost-effective ways of helping industries, workers, and communities battered by intense import competition. The book focuses on the escape clause of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, meant to provide domestic industries temporary shelter from severe import competition, and the trade adjustment assistance program, designed to provide direct aid to companies, workers, and communities injured by imports. The authors analyze the assumptions and implication of the many current congressional attempts to amend the provisions of the escape clause and the assistance program. They then set forth their own proposals, including new definitions of import injuries, modifications of provisions for providing relief for beleaguered companies, new standards for compensating and retaining displaced workers, and a plan for insuring communities against severe losses to their tax bases if local industries fail because they can no longer compete. Saving Free Trade provides a detailed but nontechnical introduction to the complex implications of amending trade policy and shrewd, innovative proposals for improving America's ability to adapt to rapid changes in world markets.

Neither Free Trade Nor Protection provides a critical exploration of mainstream and alternative theories of international trade and presents original evidence of trade's consequences. It rejects the choice between openness and closure. Mainstream economists almost always support 'free trade' but their arguments for this are flawed and too often rely on a caricature of their opponents as simple-minded protectionists. Meanwhile, many critics successfully emphasize shortcomings of the orthodoxy but struggle to identify a more positive agenda, either seeing free trade as a desirable, if unachievable, end or equally simplistically blaming trade for international inequality. Both sides of the trade debate share much in terms of how they understand the objectives of national wealth and in how they overlook other economic processes and social questions. Bill Dunn's examination covers:- critical interrogation of both mainstream and heterodox theories - systematic evaluation of contemporary evidence - historical context - trade, restructuring and the crisis of the 2000s - economics as a social science Written in plain English, this book will appeal to students, researchers and political activists alike. It is an indispensable resource to those seeking a deeper understanding of alternative approaches to the mainstream theories of trade and economics.