In Power and Regionalism in Latin America: The Politics of MERCOSUR, Laura Gomez-Mera examines the erratic patterns of regional economic cooperation in the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), a political-economic agreement among Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and, recently, Venezuela that comprises the world's fourth-largest regional trade bloc. Despite a promising start in the early 1990s, MERCOSUR has had a tumultuous and conflict-ridden history. Yet it has survived, expanding in membership and institutional scope. What explains its survival, given a seemingly contradictory mix of conflict and cooperation? Through detailed empirical analyses of several key trade disputes between the bloc's two main partners, Argentina and Brazil, Gomez-Mera proposes an explanation that emphasizes the tension between and interplay of two sets of factors: power asymmetries within and beyond the region, and domestic-level politics. Member states share a common interest in preserving MERCOSUR as a vehicle for increasing the region's leverage in external negotiations. Gomez-Mera argues that while external vulnerability and overlapping power asymmetries have provided strong and consistent incentives for regional cooperation in the Southern Cone, the impact of these systemic forces on regional outcomes also has been crucially mediated by domestic political dynamics in the bloc's two main partners, Argentina and Brazil. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the unequal distribution of power within the bloc has had a positive effect on the sustainability of cooperation. Despite Brazil's reluctance to adopt a more active leadership role in the process of integration, its offensive strategic interests in the region have contributed to the durability of institutionalized collaboration. However, as Gomez-Mera demonstrates, the tension between Brazil's global and regional power aspirations has also added significantly to the bloc's ineffectiveness.

Transforming NATO: New Allies, Missions, and Capabilities, by Ivan Dinev Ivanov, examines the three dimensions of NATO's transformation since the end of the Cold War: the addition of a dozen new allies; the undertaking of new missions such as peacekeeping, crisis response, and stabilization; and the development of new capabilities to implement these missions. The book explains these processes through two mutually reinforcing frameworks: club goods theory and the concept of complementarities. NATO can be viewed as a diverse, heterogeneous club of nations providing collective defense to its members, who, in turn, combine their military resources in a way that enables them to optimize the Alliance's capabilities needed for overseas operations. Transforming NATO makes a number of theoretical contributions. First, it offers new insights into understanding how heterogeneous clubs operate. Second, it introduces a novel concept, that of complementarities. Finally, it re-evaluates the relevance of club goods theory as a framework for studying contemporary international security. These conceptual foundations apply to areas well beyond NATO. They provide useful insights into understanding the operation of transatlantic relations, alliance politics, and a broader set of international coalitions and partnerships. This update in April 2013 covers new developments related to NATO's transformation after this book was originally published: http://homepages.uc.edu/~ivanovid/pdfs/book_update.pdf

An assessment of the impact of NAFTA on Mexico and its implications for the broadening of hemispheric economic cooperation.

Four years after the launching of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), debate over its costs and benefits remains intense -- as revealed late in 1997 when President Clinton failed to get Congress to approve his administration's request for a "fast track" authority to negotiate the broader proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This volume of original essays attempts to understand why by looking closely at the effects that NAFTA has already had and sorting out fact from fiction.

The first part of the book examines the impact that NAFTA has had on the Mexican economy, seeking to distinguish those trends that can be attributed to Mexico's participation in NAFTA from those that are more related to domestic politics and long-term structural weaknesses of the country's economy. The second part, using an interdisciplinary approach, studies the wider political and economic ramifications of NAFTA, asking how much NAFTA has helped or hindered the efforts to establish the FTAA. The essays together provide alternative explanations for the anti-NAFTA mood that prevails among important sectors and constituencies within the United States.

The contributors are Peter Andreas, Denise Dresser, Stephan Haggard, Jonathan Heath, Sylvia Maxfield, Manuel Pastor, Adam Shapiro, and Ngaire Woods.

To access the additional resources mentioned in this book, Click Here. Regional trade agreements (RTAs) are not new, but their importance in global economics and politics has grown exponentially in the past two decades. At the same time, RTAs have become increasingly controversial as their number, scope, and cross-cutting memberships become so complex that many fear they will undermine the World Trade Organization's multilateral trading system. Ranging from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to the European Union to the North American Free Trade Agreement, RTAs have equally wide-ranging purposes, from improving market access to increasing clout in international negotiations. Tackling this complexity and confusion head on, this book provides a much-needed guide to RTAs. Setting current regional agreements in their economic, political, and historical context, David A. Lynch describes and compares virtually every significant RTA, region by region. He clearly explains their intricate inner workings, their webs of collaboration and conflict, and their primary goals and effectiveness. Lynch's deeply knowledgeable study bridges the ideological divides in scholarly and public debate, including economists' emphases on markets and efficiency versus antiglobalization activists' concerns over inequality and social ills. By building a middle ground between micro and macro analysis and clarifying technical terminology, this concise and accessible book will be an invaluable reference for all nonspecialists.

In Constraining Public Libraries: The World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services, the authors present a compelling argument for why the library community should be concerned about the effect of international trade agreements on the ability to deliver library and information services to the public. The book begins with a rigorous yet succinct description of the relevant provisions of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), proceeds to discuss how it is likely to impact particular public library services, and then discusses how the library community could best respond to these challenges. While there cannot be certainty when considering how GATS will ultimately impinge upon public libraries, this book pinpoints potential problem areas. It is a valuable tool in informing the dialogue within public libraries on the World Trade Organization, and providing the foundation for effective advocacy at the domestic and international levels to ensure that public libraries continue to play a central role in their communities for generations to come. Those in library and information science, as well as public administrators, educators, students, political and policy science professionals, government officials, and trade negotiators, will find this book to be an informative resource.

This work is a study of the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By focusing on the issue of justice in the contexts of globalization and neo-colonialism, the book contributes to a broader discussion of the significance of NAFTA. Authors Laurence French and Magdaleno ManzanOrez emphasize cultural and ethnic issues in the relations of NAFTA partners and enrich treatment of the topic by bringing to bear sociology, political science, justice studies, psychology, and educational theory. The authors relate classical sociological theory to contemporary issues of social and criminal justice.

Bananas are taken for granted today as part of the diet of ordinary people in industrial countries. In the Windward Islands of the Caribbean, bananas provided around one-third of all jobs and half their export earnings - until recent WTO rulings began to undermine the industry. Much of this trade and employment has now disappeared as a result of these rulings; and at the end of 2005, the EU is due to give up the last non-tariff measures designed to enable this trade to continue. Unemployment, poverty, and further emigration therefore loom over these islanders, or the tempting alternative of growing and trading in illegal drugs. And all because WTO rules take too little account of the problems of tiny island economies and the human cost of rigid application of global free-trade rules. In this absorbing history, Gordon Myers tells the extraordinary story of how the US government, in response to grievances of one American corporation, led the World Trade Organisation to nullify a European Community commitment to protect the livelihood of small Caribbean banana growers. The WTO's own working practices also emerge as inflexible and myopic. The story illustrates the inadequacy of an international trading system dominated by free-trade ideology but lacking the flexibility necessary to enable very small and highly vulnerable states, like the Windward Islands, to receive the protection that they need in order to survive. Moreover, increasingly powerful supermarket chains are able to exploit this free-trade framework to insist on ever lower prices, to the short-term benefit of consumers but the serious detriment of growers in the developing world. This book is a call for new arrangements in the EU that will enable the Caribbean banana industry to survive beyond 2005, and for an outlook in the WTO that gives greater consideration to the needs of very small states with vulnerable economies.

When it came into force in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) joined the economic futures of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with systematic rules governing trade and investment, dispute resolution, and economic relations. However, economic integration among the three countries extends considerably beyond trade and investment. The NAFTA agreement takes a very narrow view of integration, barely addressing such vital issues as immigration policy and labor markets, the energy sector, environmental protection, and law enforcement. The governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States now must confront the question of whether NAFTA is enough. Do they want to keep their trilateral relationship focused on economic matters or are they interested in integrating more deeply --perhaps initiating a process to build a North American Community similar to the European Union? This volume contains thoughtful discussions about the future of North America by knowledgeable experts from each of the three countries. Robert Pastor has written one of the more comprehensive books on the subject, Toward a North American Community (Institute for International Economics, 2001). Andr's Rozental is an ambassador at large for Mexico and president of Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internationacionales, the country's leading foreign policy association in Mexico. Perrin Beatty is a former foreign minister of Canada and currently the president and CEO of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. The governments of Canada, the United States, and Mexico face thorny challenges as they decide whether and how to accelerate smooth, and institutionalize the integration process. Pastor, Rozenthal, and Beatty encourage greater dialogue among the three governments and their citizens, as well as more systematic thinking among policymakers and citizens about the promise and challenges of further North American integration. This volume considers the promise and challenges of further North American integration, including: - migration, security cooperation, and cross-border commerce - the establishment of a permanent North American Court on Trade and Investment, to replace the current ad hoc tribunals -the possibility of widening NAFTA to incorporate countries in Central America and the Caribbean -collaboration in dealing with criminal drug trafficking, environmental protection, energy and water management, and transportation, communications and other infrastructure development.

"If there is spin, there is counterspin: "The Selling of 'Free Trade' is a devastating unraveling of yet another Bill Clinton con job. MacArthur tells the NAFTA story in the voices of those who did the spinning and those who suffered from it. It doesn't get much better."--Seymour M. Hersh

"A gripping and fresh analysis of the corporate construction of an onrushing NAFTA and the human damage in its wake. MacArthur demonstrates what happens when an underdeveloped democracy is confronted by an overdeveloped corporation-governmental oligarchy."--Ralph Nader, consumer advocate.

As the fallout from the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) continues, John Madeley explores some key questions about the free trade that it advocates: will free trade in food help or hinder the abolition of world hunger?; who benefits first? the poor? or the transnational corporations?; will free trade help Third World farmers find new international markets?; or will the flood of cheap, subsidized food from the North eliminate them?; how can countries - North and South, rich and poor - protect their farmers?; and how can self-sufficiency in food production be achieved?;John Madeley shows that the food imports of many developing countries are rising sharply while their food exports to the industrial countries are not. He exposes the contradictions between Western governments' rhetoric about reducing world poverty and the drive to yet more trade liberalization John Madely is a writer and broadcaster specialising in Third World devlopment and environmental issues.

If ever there existed a benign-sounding organisation, it is surely the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is the successor to GATT. According to the WTO itself, its mission is "dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, the legal ground-rules for international commerce and for trade policy. The agreements have three main objectives: to help trade flow as freely as possible; to achieve further liberalisation gradually through negotiation; and to set up an impartial means of settling disputes". This book seeks to illuminate some key issues related to the WTO as well as present a detailed bibliography for future reference.

Free trade lies at the heart of the new era of globalisation. This superb account explains the theory of free trade and how it has been put into practice. The author reviews the history of 20th century trade agreements. He traces what happened to GATT, with its quite narrow ambit, before the USA pushed the world into the Uruguay Round. This renegotiation of the rules of international trade, enshrined in the World Trade Organisation Agreements, is now taking free trade much further than ever before. The author examines the benefits and hidden costs of the WTO Agreements in both economic and non-economic terms. He looks at their implications for weaker economies and their likely consequences in terms of environmental protection, labour standards and political sovereignty. But alternatives do exist, he argues, to an over-reliance on free trade. These include managed trade, fair trade and self-reliant trade. And he sets out a series of innovative proposals for reforming the basic building blocks for managing the global economy - the WTO, IMF and World Bank.

In April 1998 negotiations were launched to create a free trade area among thirty-four countries in the Western Hemisphere. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will eliminate barriers to trade in goods and services and will remove restrictions on investment among the countries of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. At the same time, negotiators in the World Trade Organization (WTO) are preparing to begin talks on agriculture and services, with the possibility of a new round of WTO negotiations. Trade policymakers are confronted with a wide range of complex issues and various forums for trade liberalization. Modern trade negotiations no longer focus only on barriers to trade in goods, but include a wide array of issues. This volume aims to clarify these issues. Contributors first address themes, including the evolution of regional arrangements in the Western Hemisphere and the relationship between regional trade arrangements and the multilateral trading system. Robert Hudec provides an in-depth analysis of the provisions and future implications of Article XXIV, the WTO article that regulates regional arrangements; Robert Lawrence examines regional arrangements and their relationship to the multilateral trading system; and Miguel Rodr?guez Mendoza tests several Latin American arrangements to see whether they comply with the WTO criteria. Other contributors discuss key components of the current trade policy agenda, including market access approaches, trade in services, investment, competition policy, intellectual property rights, trade remedy laws, and dispute settlement. Also examined are smaller economies in trade negotiations, and labor and the environment. The book serves both as an analytical examination of regionalism and multilateralism and a primer for international trade negotiators. Copublished with the Organization of American States

In this book, Edward J. Lincoln tackles the thorny issue of U.S. trade relations with Japan, the subject of so much tension in the 1990s. In so doing, he builds on his earlier Brookings book, Japan's Unequal Trade. Lincoln argues that statistical evidence shows only modest progress in diminishing Japan's "distinctiveness." Despite an upturn in the mid-1990s, import penetration, intra-industry trade, and inward foreign direct investment all remain low relative to most other nations. High profile negotiating efforts by both the Bush and Clinton administrations made progress in chipping away at protectionist barriers but fundamental problems remain. While Lincoln offers suggestions on what needs to be done by both sides, the most important lesson drawn from recent experience is that expectations should be lowered. Any feasible approach to making markets more open in Japan is likely to yield slow progress. Such realism--not to be confused with defeatism--is the only approach that has any chance of realizing gains over time.

An assessment of the impact of NAFTA on Mexico and its implications for the broadening of hemispheric economic cooperation.

Four years after the launching of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), debate over its costs and benefits remains intense -- as revealed late in 1997 when President Clinton failed to get Congress to approve his administration's request for a "fast track" authority to negotiate the broader proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This volume of original essays attempts to understand why by looking closely at the effects that NAFTA has already had and sorting out fact from fiction.

The first part of the book examines the impact that NAFTA has had on the Mexican economy, seeking to distinguish those trends that can be attributed to Mexico's participation in NAFTA from those that are more related to domestic politics and long-term structural weaknesses of the country's economy. The second part, using an interdisciplinary approach, studies the wider political and economic ramifications of NAFTA, asking how much NAFTA has helped or hindered the efforts to establish the FTAA. The essays together provide alternative explanations for the anti-NAFTA mood that prevails among important sectors and constituencies within the United States.

The contributors are Peter Andreas, Denise Dresser, Stephan Haggard, Jonathan Heath, Sylvia Maxfield, Manuel Pastor, Adam Shapiro, and Ngaire Woods.

An examination of the performance of U.S. manufacturing in historical and global perspective indicates that, contrary to recent fears, international trade competition has not induced the deindustrialization of America. During the 1970s the U.S. manufacturing sector fared relatively well compared to its counterparts in other industrual countries and its own post-war track record. Most of its problems in the early 1980s are linked to domestic recession and the strong U.S. dollar. A number of implicit assumptions in the current discussion about U.S. industrial performance are shown in this book to be inappropriate changes in international trade are not the major reason for the declining share of manufacturing in U.S. employment: even though foreign productive capabilities are catching up with those of the United States, the U.S. comparative advantage in high-technology products has increased. The author looks at these and other issues and seeks to clarify some common misperceptions about U.S. manufacturing. He examines long-term trends and changes since 1973 in U.S. manufacturing employment, capital formation, research and development expenditures, and output. He looks closely at manufacturing trade flows and their major determinants and at the role of trade in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The last part of the book addresses policy options for the United States, including laissez-faire, matching foreign subsidies, and new industrial policies. Changes in U.S. policies are suggested that might facilitate efficient structural trade adjustment, improve trade policy, and compensate for market failures.

In Donald J. Trump and China John F. Copper examines President Trump’s views of China that developed before and after he entered office. As a businessman and as a witness to US politics and foreign policy, Trump realized China was the most important country in the world to the United States. He also recognized that one of the key difficulties in American trade policy was the imbalance between the US and China. Copper argues that Trump blamed policy makers for the disparity and was determined to rectify the imbalance. President Trump undertook formulating a new China policy in spite of nonsupporters in the Democratic Party, the media, academia, and Hollywood. Donald Trump accepted China’s rise as an economic power and felt he could negotiate with President Xi to construct a positive relationship that would benefit both countries, save the global financial system, curb nuclear proliferation, and save the environment. Ultimately, Copper asserts that Trump knew a constructive relationship with China would be challenging, however he also understood that this is the nature of big power politics and strategic negotiations and realism would ensure peace between these two powerful countries.

The United States is entering a period of profound uncertainty in the world political economy-an uncertainty which is threatening the liberal economic order that its own statesmen created at the end of the Second World War. The storm surrounding this threat has been ignited by an issue that has divided Americans since the nation's founding: international trade. Is America better off under a liberal trade regime, or would protectionism be more beneficial? The issue divided Alexander Hamilton from Thomas Jefferson, the agrarian south from the industrializing north, and progressives from robber barons in the Gilded Age. In our own times, it has pitted anti-globalization activists and manufacturing workers against both multinational firms and the bulk of the economics profession. Ambassador C. Donald Johnson's The Wealth of a Nation is an authoritative history of the politics of trade in America from the Revolution to the Trump era. Johnson begins by charting the rise and fall of the U.S. protectionist system from the time of Alexander Hamilton to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. Challenges to protectionist dominance were frequent and often serious, but the protectionist regime only faded in the wake of the Great Depression. After World War II, America was the primary architect of the liberal rules-based economic order that has dominated the globe for over half a century. Recent years, however, have seen a swelling anti-free trade movement that casts the postwar liberal regime as anti-worker, pro-capital, and-in Donald Trump's view-even anti-American. In this riveting history, Johnson emphasizes the benefits of the postwar free trade regime, but focuses in particular on how it has attempted to advance workers' rights. This analysis of the evolution of American trade policy stresses the critical importance of the multilateral trading system's survival and defines the central political struggle between business and labor in measuring the wealth of a nation.

This volume contains a collection of studies examining trade-related issues negotiated in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and how RTAs are related to the WTO's rules. While previous work has focused on subsets of RTAs, these studies are based on what is probably the largest dataset used to date, and highlight key issues that have been negotiated in all RTAs notified to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). New rules within RTAs are compared to rules agreed upon by WTO members. The extent of their divergences and the potential implications for parties to RTAs, as well as for WTO members that are not parties to RTAs, are examined. This volume makes an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs.

World hunger, jobs, the overall economic prospects of developing and developed countries alike are all being influenced by the international negotiations about trade, agriculture, services, investment and intellectual property rights going on at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Based on interviews with the participants, this remarkable book lifts the shroud of secrecy surrounding these ostensibly democratic negotiations.
What emerges is a disturbing account entirely at odds with the official picture of a rules-based consensus emerging out of multilateral trade discussions in which all WTO member countries are equal participants. In reality:
- Closed doors rather than open access and public information is the preferred mode of negotiation;
- Decisions are often being made without the full approval of developing countries;
- The tiny delegations of the poorest and smallest countries have only a limited capacity to calculate in advance the implications of what they are being asked to sign up to;
- More seriously still, there are instances of illegitimate pressures and inducements being offered by the US and EU delegations - including threats to report non-compliant Third World delegates to their superiors, and hints that aid to countries refusing to kow-tow may be withheld.
The revelations contained in this book are of enormous importance to all those concerned that international institutions should be more transparent and democratic, and that the rules being developed for the world economy should primarily be geared to solving the pressing humanitarian problems of poverty, hunger, jobs and improvements in the standards of living of all those being left behind by the process of globalization.

Despite troubled trade negotiations, global trade and trade policy will thrive in the twenty-first century, but with a bow to the past. Is the multilateral trading order of the twentieth century a historical artifact? Was the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 the high point of multilateral cooperation on trade? This new volume, edited by Bernard M. Hoekman and Ernesto Zedillo, assesses the relevance of the WTO in the context of the rise of China and the United States' turn toward unilateral protectionism. The contributors adopt a historical perspective to discuss changes in global trade policy trends, adducing lessons from the past to help understand current trade tensions. Topics include responses to U.S. protectionism under the Trump administration, the policy dimensions of trade in services and the rise of the digital economy, how to strengthen the WTO to better negotiate new rules of the game and adjudicate disputes, managing China's integration into the global trade system, and the implications of global value chains for economic development policies. By reflecting on past episodes of protectionism and how they were resolved, Trade in the 21st Century provides both context and guidance on how trade challenges can be addressed in the coming decades.