As the prime force behind trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, the United States is emerging with two trade projects--the newly-signed North American Free Trade Agreement and the projected New American Community. This volume provides a clear, concise guide to all aspects of the 5-volume NAFTA accord, its side agreements, and the unfolding New American Community. It covers specific issues, rationalizations, ideologies, controversies, and recommended actions. With special emphasis on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the volume will provide a major resource for both academics and decision makers in industry and government. Written by a leading authority on U.S. Latin American trade, the volume includes entries, arranged alphabetically, on NAFTA and other trade-related topics. The NAFTA entries are based on the five-volume treaty or official government and nongovernmental publications. Since the New American Community is still emerging, the non-NAFTA entries are interpolations from past trade accords and existing nationwide agreements or ideas based on global concepts and directives, especially the European Union.

Reevaluating NAFTA seeks to answer the question: has NAFTA integrated North America? A fifteen-year NAFTA appraisal finds trade expansion boosting optimism, but also unveils stark asymmetry between developed and developing countries as well as top-heavy NAFTA regulations seriously constraining ground-level integration. Using empirical data analysis and a wide-reaching theoretical context, this book seeks to evaluate the results of NAFTA's 'fifteen-year itch' to identify what worked and what didn't, and ultimately, to point to the future of North American integration.

"Post-NAFTA North America" uniquely combines an institutional examination of NAFTA with a geo-economic and geo-political approach. The author argues that in the post-9/11 era, North America is evolving from a primarily economic space to a strategic 'securitized' one and that NAFTA has been utilized by the US as a regulatory framework for dealing with the pressures of globalization that have emerged in the post-Cold War era.

Exploring bilateral narratives of identity at a socio-discursive level from 1990 onwards, this book provides a new approach to understanding how Chile and Australia imagine and discursively construct each other in light of the bilateral Free Trade Agreement signed in 2008.

"The first detailed historical account of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations, this book covers the genesis of the project in the early 1990s to its demise in late 2003. It examines how the FTAA, an Inter-American policy idea, was incompatible with the predominant ideas and beliefs of Brazilian and American decision makers as to how they could and should conduct their countries' foreign trade policy in the Western Hemisphere. Its multidisciplinary nature and the incorporation of a case study of foreign policymaking in an emerging economy make it attractive to scholars and students of Political Sciences and International Relations, and to all those interested in the power dynamics in asymmetrical relations"--

With the stagnation of the Doha Round of multilateral talks, trade liberalisation is increasingly undertaken through free trade agreements. Gabriel Siles-Brugge examines the EU's decision following the 2006 'Global Europe' strategy to negotiate such agreements with emerging economies. Eschewing the purely materialist explanations prominent in the field, he develops a novel constructivist argument to highlight the role of language and ideas in shaping EU trade policy. Drawing on extensive interviews and documentary analysis, Siles-Brugge shows how EU trade policymakers have privileged the interests of exporters to the detriment of import-competing groups, creating an ideational imperative for market-opening. Even during the on-going economic crisis the overriding mantra has been that the EU's future well-being depends on its ability to compete in global markets. The increasingly neoliberal orientation of EU trade policy has also had important consequences for its economic diplomacy with the developing economies of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of states.

Condon explains key aspects of NAFTA and WTO rules on trade in goods and services, foreign direct investment and intellectual property protection and shows how these rules affect global business strategies. Cases are used to illustrate how these agreements work and how they affect crucial business interests. He examines the political context in which the negotiation and enforcement of trade agreements take place and how business people can enforce the rules and influence the negotiations to support global business strategies. He also shows how NAFTA, WTO, and global business strategy affect some of the major issues of our time, such as AIDS, global security, environmental protection, globalization protesters, and illegal migration from Mexico to the United States.

Anyone doing business from, to, and within the NAFTA region will find this essential reading. NAFTA and WTO interact in ways that can make or break a company's strategy. Business strategists must consider the impact of today's rules and how future developments will affect them. However, as Condon makes clear, this book is about more than just business. The globalization of law and business affects the lives of everyone. Scholars, researchers, students, and international business professionals will find the book of value, as will those involved with financial services, international law, and international relations.

To what extent do domestic politics affect the agreement reached in an international trade negotiation? In order to address this question, Christopher C. Meyerson develops an approach to analyzing the relationship between domestic politics and international relations in trade policymaking. This approach is used to analyze both American and Japanese trade policymaking and US-Japan trade negotiations, especially during the GATT Uruguay Round agricultural negotiations between 1986 and 1994.

This book offers guidelines for the upcoming discussions on reform, representing an attempt to work out conceptions for a better international competition order on the basis of the scientific approach 'law and economics'. It presents the dominant concepts of competition policy as a basis for an international competition order and formulates a synthesis. The result is a new neo-ordoliberal approach. Anti-dumping-measures are analysed of the effects on international competition and resource allocation, and alternatives and improvements are suggested. From national forms of competition policy a synthesis of international competition policies are derived. Currently reforms of the international competition order are heavily discussed and here a selection of the most important suggestions are presented, compared, and evaluated. Finally, this book offers strategies that might serve as second-best solutions, and though they may not be optimal for competition policy, they are politically feasible and an improvement on the current competition regulations. They would be a back-up in case the WTO competition regulations aren't realizable.

Mutual Recognition (MR) implies that each Member State is free to use the standards for production it prefers but cannot inhibit the import from other Member States lawfully using other standards, unless justified by emergency reasons. The home country rule then prevails on the host country. Barriers to entry diminish, competition rises in the internal market. This collection looks at a number of aspects of MR, including why its importance cannot be understood outside the general practice of free movement and how some elements of MR already emerge in the skilled labour market of professionals.

While the long-term gains from liberalization are generally accepted, liberalizing economies are, nevertheless, likely to face short to medium term adjustment costs. Yet most developing countries do not have well-developed social safety nets to address these problems. This book gauges the possible development implications of the current WTO trade negotiations by examining the various proposals and assessing their likely economic impact. Eight country studies examine the experiences of a number of countries at different levels of development and across various regions to ascertain the impact of their trade reforms and the factors contributing to the outcomes.

A topical study of regional arrangements covering ASEAN, SAARC and APEC in Asia, NAFTA and MERCOSUR in the Americas, SADC, SACU and ECOWAS in Africa, and the European Union, EFTA and Eastern Europe. The book argues that foreign direct investment is complementary to trade and most regional arrangements can create trade and induce growth so long as they remain open and non-discriminatory. But they could also become stumbling blocks to globalization. The book demonstrates how US and EU trade policy will be crucial in shaping the world economy.

NAFTA has been described by one expert as being a partial customs union. It is, in any case, a special kind of free trade area because it consists of two highly developed economies and one large third world economy. In this book, the contributors examine the specific interests of the three member countries, Canada, Mexico, and the United States in the creation of NAFTA. They also assess the influence of this trade area on their economics. Looking to the future, doubts are expressed about the feasibility of using NAFTA (a hope expressed by the USA) as a stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Instead, the contributors see the consolidation of MERCOSUR in Latin America and the creation of a new Trans-Atlantic Market - as proposed by Sir Leon Brittan - as more likely developments.

Policy makers in Southern Africa are increasingly convinced that regional trade liberalization can improve growth performance and stimulate development throughout the region. To succeed where previous attempts have failed, however, governments must address two key issues. The first of these is policy coordination - the broad range of domestic policies must be made compatible with the proposed trade reforms. The second is institution building - concerted attention must be devoted to strengthening weak institutions and infrastructure. The contributors are among the leading authorities on regional integration in Africa.

World hunger is prevalent yet receives relatively less attention compared to poverty. The MDGs have taken a step to address this with the resolution of halving the number of starving people in the world by 2015. Hunger though is not a straightforward problem of producing enough to feed the world's population; it has many cross-cutting dimensions. This volume discusses the significance of human rights approaches to food and the way it relates to gender considerations, addressing links between hunger and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment.

The fight between North and South over intellectual property (IP) reached new heights in the 1990s. In one corner, large multinational companies and developed countries sought to protect their investments. Opposing them, developing countries argued for the time and scope to pursue development strategies unshackled by rules forged to bolster the competitiveness of richer countries. The result was the WTO's deeply contested Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Widely resented by developing countries, TRIPS nonetheless permits them some hard-won flexibility. Puzzling, however, is why some developing countries have used that flexibility and others have not. Even more curious is that many of the poorest countries have made least use of the room for manouevre, despite securing some extra concessions. For developing countries, TRIPS did not end the pro-IP offensive. At the urging of industry lobbyists, powerful countries backtracked on the flexibilities in TRIPS and pursued even stronger global IP rules. To prevent precedents for weaker IP standards in poorer countries, they issued threats to market access, aid, investment, and political alliances. Further, they used new trade deals and, more subtly, capacity building (assisted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, among others) to leverage faster compliance and higher standards than TRIPS requires. Meanwhile, 'pro-development' advocates from civil society, other UN agencies, and developing countries worked to counter 'compliance-plus' pressures and defend the use of TRIPS flexibilities, sometimes with success. Within developing countries, most governments had little experience of IP laws and deferred TRIPS implementation to IP offices cut-off from trade politics and national policymaking, making them more vulnerable to the TRIPS-plus agenda. In many of the poorest African countries, regional IP arrangements magnified this effect. For scholars of international political economy and law, this book is the first detailed exploration of the links between global IP politics and the implementation of IP reforms. It exposes how power politics occur not just within global trade talks but afterwards when countries implement agreements. The Implementation Game will be of interest to all those engaged in debates on the global governance of trade and IP

This volume assesses the implementation of the EU's cohesion policy and the role that the policy has in stimulating ten new member states from eastern and southern European countries to join the EU in 2004 and in attracting another three to four countries that will join in the near future.

In his foreword to the book, Sidney Weintraub argues that the negotiations leading to the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) may be the most important between the United States and Mexico since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. This book examines those negotiations from the vantage point of one of the key Mexican officials, Hermann von Bertrab. As an insider, but as someone on the other side of the discussions, he provides a prospective rarely offered of contemporary American foreign and economic policymaking.

Concentrating on the negotiations between the United States and Mexico, with some analysis of the Canadian component, von Bertrab characterizes the discussions as moving through four stages: an initial fast track, the detailed examination of the proposals, a stage of mobilization political support and working out side agreements, and a ratification stage. All in all, a fascinating report on a major diplomatic event and an opportunity to see ourselves as we are seen by foreign officials. Of considerable interest to scholars and researchers of contemporary American foreign and economic policymaking and Latin American Studies.

This book examines the nature of the evolutionary relationship that developed between the United States and the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) system, and considers the effects of this relationship on their individual evolution and development. These effects were felt, within the GATT system, on its role in international trade, manner and method of functioning, form, and the very nature of its existence; and, within the United States, on its international trade policy and role in the system, the nature of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches vis-a-vis trade, and the relationship between the branches of government and private industry.
The book begins by looking at the events, particularly in the 1920's and 1930's, that predated and created the environment out of which the GATT system developed. It then looks at the formation process and the development of the GATT system as a whole. Since the role of the United States was crucial throughout this entire process, the book examines that role in particular depth, especially as it reflected and helped to form US trade legislation. The role of the other countries throughout this entire process is included in the examination and analysis only in so far as they had an effect upon the evolution and development of the GATT system and affected the course of US action.

This book shows how large an impact the WTO has on developing countries. It assesses the subsidies given and shows how they will be affected by trade liberalization. It looks in particular at the TRIPS agreement and assesses the costs and benefits that it will have for developing countries.

This book presents a theoretical investigation of the formation of regional free trade agreements (FTAs), the behavior of global enterprises, and government trade policies in various game forms including multi-stage games, repeated games, and timing games. In the last few decades, the number of FTAs has been rapidly increasing in the world, especially in Asia. In particular, East Asian countries are expected to be main engines for sustaining the world economy. Focusing on East Asian economies, strategic behaviors of governments and firms in order to attain their own aims are examined. The analytical methods employed in this book are those currently being developed or that recently have been created. The topics are important contemporary issues in regional areas facing the rapid economic changes brought about by globalization. Most chapters of this book are based on original work that was published in international journals but now has been completely rewritten, with restructuring and extension of the original work. This book, with its up-to-date information, will be of interest to academic researchers in universities and economic research institutions and to students working on advanced degrees in economics.

The Domestic Politics of International Trade considers the issues surrounding intellectual property rights in international trade negotiations in order to examine the challenges posed to domestic policy-makers by the increasingly broad nature of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Throughout the book the author demonstrates the importance of domestic politics in understanding the nature and outcome of international negotiations, particularly as they relate to international economic diplomacy. The book looks in detail at the intellectual property negotiations which formed part of the US-Peru and US-Colombia Free Trade Agreements and analyses the extent to which public health authorities and other parties affected by the increased levels of intellectual property protection were integrated into the negotiation process. The book then juxtaposes these findings with an analysis of the domestic origins of US negotiation objectives in the field of intellectual property, paying particular attention to the role of the private sector in the development of these objectives. Based on a substantial amount of empirical research, including approximately 100 interviews with negotiators, capital based policy-makers, private sector representatives, and civil society organisations in Lima, Bogota and Washington, DC, this book offers a rare account of different stakeholders' perceptions of the FTA negotiation process. Ultimately, the book succeeds in integrating the study of domestic politics with that of international negotiations. This book will be of particular interest to academics as well as practitioners and students in the fields of international law, economic law, intellectual property, political economy, international relations, comparative politics and government.