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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

This volume addresses the growth of regional trade agreements (RTAs) which have mushroomed since the 1990s, and considers their potential as a tool for reducing inter- and intra-state conflict.

Exploring the links between trade, conflict and peace in different and varying contexts, this book maps the extant RTAs in the region, analyses the factors which hinder or promote regional trade integration and considers their economic and political impacts. Presenting a series of case studies in four regions: South America; the southern African region; South Asia and South East Asia, the authors consider three key questions:

• What is the significance of the recent and rapid development of RTAs for peace building both within and between countries?
• To what extent do RTAs engender inter and intrastate conflict?
• To what extent are trade and RTAs hostage to conflict and is regional political stability a precondition for economic integration?

Regional Trade Integration and Conflict Resolution will be of interests to students and scholars of trade, international relations and conflict studies. It will also be of interest to policy makers and NGOs.

This text addresses the prospects and challenges of the free trade area of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. In a broad context, therefore, it focuses on one of the most important challenges to world trade in the 21st century, especially for Africa and the developing world, namely the question of regional trade integration. The most extant theoretical and empirical aspects of the question are integrated with institutional and policy issues. The analysis is illustrated through examples from a sample of African economies. The book concludes by proposing the vision and appropriate strategies for advancing the regional trading arrangements by COMESA. It is hoped that the work will make a timely contribution not only to our understanding of the prospects and challenges of regional trading arrangements in Africa but also to the paradigm of regional trade integration in developing countries. The book is comprehensive in coverage and attempts to strike a balance between the theory, evidence and policy issues.

In Traders in a Brave New World, Ernest H. Preeg, a distinguished former U.S. diplomat and trade negotiator, presents a blow-by-blow account of the Uruguay Round, an examination of the historical context in which it took place, and an insider's assessment of the agreement's future impact on the international trading system. The GATT was established in 1947 as a multilateral agreement on international trade. Of the eight rounds of negotiations, the Uruguay Round, covering the period from 1981 to 1994, had the widest participation and involved the most intensive negotiations. It was also the most comprehensive round, encompassing new areas such as trade in services and the protection of intellectual property, as well as longstanding problem areas such as agriculture and textiles. Most significantly, this round resulted in the establishment of a permanent World Trade Organization, which will provide the institutional basis for future international trade and a forum for settlement of disputes. Preeg places the Uruguay Round in the broader context of global politics and economics, showing how changes in the world order - from the collapse of communism to dramatic economic reforms in developing countries - influenced both the topics of negotiations and their outcome. He then assesses the final GATT agreement as a case study in international negotiations and evaluates its probable effects on income and trade. Finally, Preeg looks to the short- and long-term issues confronting future trade-policy negotiators. He shows that the international trade agenda will consist of three evolving types of agreement - further multilateral commitments, regional free-trade agreements, and selective bilateralaccords. Going to the heart of current debates on the "new world order", an important final chapter evaluates the political and economic relationships that will result from the international trading system.