This study examines the complex issue of trade liberalization in the Americas, and poses the questions: Where do we want to go and how do we get there? It examines the economics of a hub-and-spoke system versus an expanding FTA, and patterns of existing trade in the hemisphere.

Analyzes the economic, social, political and environmental implications of NAFTA from a range of critical perspectives. The chapters, unified by a sceptical view of the management of economic integration in North America cover the economic strategy of Mexico, Canada-US trade agreement and more.

Depicting NAFTA to be but a stepping stone rather than final product of regional economic integrative efforts, a chapter-specific 15-year assessment conveys the upsides and downsides of North America's Camelot moment.

Examines negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Analyses issues involved and provides policy recommendations through study of the potential impact and critical factors concerning trade, investment, labour, the environment, and intellectual property. Also covers the impact upon and adjustments required in major industrial sectors - energy, steel, automobiles, textiles and apparel, agriculture, and the financial system.

Exploring regionalism from a political economic perspective, this text investigates why regional arrangements are formed, the conditions under which these arrangements solidify, and why they take on different institutional forms.

The vision of a hemispheric system of free trade charts a bold new course for U.S--Latin American relations that promises to transform the economic and political landscape of the hemisphere well into the next century. In "The Premise and the Promise, "analysts from the United States, Latin America, and Canada explore the dynamics of the process under way in the Americas today, what features free trade ought to have, how the process of regional integration should proceed, and how the regional architecture should be related to the international trading system. Mexico's decision to seek a free trade agreement with the United States and Washington's announcement of the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative turned the incipient integrationist revival of the mid-1980s in Latin America into a seemingly unstoppable force. If regionalism is to be a benign force, however, it must overcome the impulse toward closed, exclusionary arrangements and emulate the best features of the multilateral approach: a regional arrangement should be flexible enough to accommodate vast regional diversity, inclusive enough to allow all countries in the region to participate, and efficient enough not to impose unduly large costs on those excluded from the arrangement. The contents include: Sylvia Saborio, "Overview: The Long and Winding Road from Anchorage to Patagonia," Peter Morici, "American Free Trade: A U.S. Perspective," Jos" Salazar and Eduardo Lizano, "Free Trade hi the Americas: A Latin American Perspective," Richard Lipsey, "Getting There: A Canadian View on WHFTA's Structure," and Refik Erzan and Alexander Yeats, "Empirical Evidence on the Impact of Free Trade Agreements with the United States on Latin America." In six separate chapters, analysts weigh the costs and benefits of subregional free trade agreements between the United States and Mexico, Chile, Central America, Caricom, the Andean Pact, and Mercosur.

By sharing one of the longest land borders in the world, the United States and Mexico will always have a special relationship. In the early twenty-first century, they are as important to one another as ever before with a vital trade partnership and often-tense migration positions. The ideal introduction to U.S.-Mexican relations, this book moves from conflicts all through the nineteenth century up to contemporary democratic elections in Mexico. Domínguez and Fernández de Castro deftly trace the path of the relationship between these North American neighbors from bloody conflicts to (wary) partnership. By covering immigration, drug trafficking, NAFTA, democracy, environmental problems, and economic instability, the second edition of The United States and Mexico provides a thorough look back and an informed vision of the future.

In the early 1990s, borders within Europe and between the United States and Mexico began to open. The increasing flow of goods, capital, ideas and people across boundaries promised to reduce physical and cognitive distances. Simultaneously, challenges to identity have arisen within and between the European nation-states, driven not only by internal cultural and political dynamics, but also by processes of globalization. Concurrently, the US-Mexican border emerged in public consciousness as a location of new opportunities, largely due to public perception of the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This book explores some of the contradictory, yet simultaneous, processes affecting border regions. A team of leading scientists offers a wide range of perspectives on global, national, regional and local processes, and provides a useful matrix for understanding their complex, multilayered implications. Key concepts such as globalization, borders and identities are illustrated through local and regional case studies.

The last few decades have witnessed an extraordinary transfer of policy-making prerogatives from individual nation-states to supranational institutions. If you think this is cause for celebration, you are not alone. Within the academic community (and not only among students of international cooperation), the notion that political institutions are mutually beneficial--that they would never come into existence, much less grow in size and assertiveness, were they not "Pareto-improving"--is today's conventional wisdom. But is it true? In this richly detailed and strikingly original study, Lloyd Gruber suggests that this emphasis on cooperation's positive-sum consequences may be leading scholars of international relations down the wrong theoretical path. The fact that membership in a cooperative arrangement is voluntary, Gruber argues, does not mean that it works to everyone's advantage. To the contrary, some cooperators may incur substantial losses relative to the original, non-cooperative status quo. So what, then, keeps these participants from withdrawing? Gruber's answer, in a word, is power--specifically the "go-it-alone power" exercised by the regime's beneficiaries, many of whom would continue to benefit even if their partners, the losers, were to opt out. To lend support to this thesis, Gruber takes a fresh look at the political origins and structures of European Monetary Unification and NAFTA. But the theoretical arguments elaborated in Ruling the World extend well beyond money and trade, touching upon issues of long-standing interest to students of security cooperation, environmental politics, nation-building--even political philosophy. Bold and compelling, this book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding how "power politics" really operates and why, for better or worse, it is fueling much of the supranational activity we see today.