North American Economic Integration Research Articles

North american integration as a resource for strengthening U.S. leadership

He NAFTA Agreement, which served as a personification of North American economic integration for a quarter of a century, was created by the United States in the early 1990s as a response to the successes of the European Community. The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced NAFTA under the Trump administration, is aimed at solving another task - to counter China's economic expansion in North America and, more broadly, in the Western Hemisphere.

“Friendshoring,” ag markets, North American integration among issues examined at Yeutter Institute symposium

A Nov. 2, 2022, symposium sponsored by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Yeutter Institute brought together experts addressing a wide array of trade matters, including global ag market dynamics, North American economic integration and Asia-Pacific economic diplomacy. Among the key questions discussed: — What complications arise for efforts to shift trade policy toward “friendshoring”? — How well has North American economic integration fared in the wake of NAFTA and its successor, the USMCA? — What factors, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are currently affecting agricultural markets and global food insecurity? — What guideposts can best direct U.S. economic diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region? — Does the World Trade Organization retain relevance amid changing global trade conditions? This biennial Yeutter Institute event, with in-person and online attendance, was held at the University of Nebraska’s Innovation Campus and featured the theme, “New Patterns of Trade Integration.”

Biden Administration and Canada's Economic Interests

In the XXI century, there is a slight decline in the importance of the United States for Canada as an economic partner, but the United States remain the main external force influencing the development of the Canadian economy. Canada is interested in unhindered access of its goods to the American market, free flow of capital between the two countries, the development of North American economic integration and, most importantly, in sustainable economic growth in the United States. If the economic policy of the Joe Biden administration ensures the dynamic development of the American economy, then this will have a positive impact on the Canadian economy. At the same time, a number of provisions of Biden's economic strategy, such as raising the corporate income tax, strengthening control over mergers and acquisitions, and the "Buy American" policy, contradict Canadian economic interests. At first glance, the Biden administration's commitment to combating climate change is also negative for Canada. However, a number of Canadian stakeholders may also become beneficiaries of the new "green" course of the American economy. In general, the Canadian establishment believes that Canada’s national interests are in further integration of the US and Canadian economies. The Biden administration's tenure in the White House is unlikely to be an obstacle to this process.

Canadian Insurance Market in the 21st Century

The article analyzes and compares main trends in the development of the world and Canadian insurance markets with specific emphasis on life, non-life and total premiums written, premiums as percent of GDP, and premiums per capita. The article discusses the structure of the Canadian insurance sector and how it is influenced by the North American economic integration. The impact on the Canadian insurance market of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Canadian government's anti-epidemic measures is being assessed. It is concluded that the main factor determining the development of the Canadian insurance market is its oligopolistic structure. It is pointed out that the growing concentration of capital, as well as relatively weak presence of deposit-taking institutions and innovative firms reduce the intensity of competition on the national insurance market and enable large Canadian insurance companies to benefit from high profit margins.

Mexican Labor at the Center of North American Economic Integration

Bean, Frank D., Rodolfo 0. de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, and Sidney Weintraub, eds. At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $66, paperback $25.95. Cravey, Altha J. Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Maps, tables, index, 176 pp.; hardcover $52, paperback $19.95. De la Garza, Rodolfo 0., and Jesuis Velasco, eds. Bridging the Border: TransformingMexico-U.S. Relations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 208 pp.; hardcover $68.50, paperback $26.95. Hart, John Mason, ed. Border Crossings: Mexican andMexican-American Workers. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998. Notes, index, 243 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $18.95. Staudt, Kathleen. Free Trade? Informal Economies at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Photographs, maps, tables, index, 256 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $19.95.

Ecological economics of North American integration: the reshaping of the economic landscape in the Santiago river basin

Ecological Economics studies social metabolism; that is, the material and energy flow into and out of the economy. Using the ecological economics perspective, we analyse the transformation of the economic landscape of the Santiago river basin, Mexico. We discuss why the appropriation of water resources is one of the most important drivers of North American economic integration. We argue that the theoretical model of neo-extractivism can explain the dynamics of social metabolism behind the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Food Security, FTA and Trade Protectionism in Asian Countries

Food security is the broad area of the food for the forth coming generation. Asia’s famous economic rise as the “global factory” over several decades was facilitated by outward-oriented development strategies and a multilateral approach, based initially on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Free trade agreements (FTAs), as trade-policy instruments in Asia, were largely absent in the region’s trade policy architecture during Asia’s economic rise. Four main factors underlie the recent spread of FTA initiatives in Asia: (1) deepening market- driven economic integration in Asia, (2) European and North American economic integration, (3) the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, and (4) slow progress in the WTO Doha negotiations. Food security is mixed blessing because it is providing substitute domestic industrial and agricultural production and made a country more efficient for the production of particular product in international production for trade disruption and co-ordination failure.

20 лет НАФТА

2014 marked the 20th anniversary of the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created the world’s largest free trade area. Now it links 470 million people producing more than 19 trillion USD worth of goods and services. The article addresses five issues: the international importance of NAFTA; the economic transformation that has occurred in the USA, Canada and Mexico since the advent of the NAFTA; a “thought experiment” on what American, Canadian and Mexican performance might have been without the NAFTA; the detrimental effect of 9/11 on the North American economic integration; and what’s next? At the time of its signing, NAFTA in many ways was considered a “gold standard” in terms of international free trade agreements. For the first time ever a free trade agreement brought together both developed and developing countries. It also broadened the scope of traditional FTAs by embracing services, foreign investments and property rights, and recognized the importance of workers' and environmental rights and issues. In terms of trade and investment NAFTA has been an undisputed success. Canada ranks as the United States’ largest export market, while Mexico is its second-largest export market. Today – thanks to NAFTA – North Americans not only sell more goods to one another, they also make more things together. For every dollar of goods that Canada and Mexico export to the USA, there are 25 cents’ worth of US inputs into Canadian goods and 40 cents’ worth into Mexican ones. Regardless of the impressive economic record, NAFTA has its critics. The agreement has not underwent a major update since its inception in 1994, i.e. prior to the rise of electronic commerce and, digital services, advanced manufacturing and many other innovative features of the global economy. As far as there is no political appetite to update NAFTA directly, indirect route is a subject of wide speculation. Canada, the USA and Mexico are negotiating partners to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and any benefits conferred by the TPP that go further than NAFTA would take precedence. It is assumed that the TPP should help to modernize NAFTA commitments and upgrade the North American trade and investment.

Reevaluating NAFTA: theory and practice

Nafta's Fifteen Year Itch North American Economic Integration in Theoretical Context: Neo-Functionalism or not Functional? Investment: Sticky Fingers? Nafta's Dispute Settlement Mechanism: Designs, 15-Year Performances, Comparisons Nafta & Intellectual Property Rights Increasing Nafta Trade Trends: Incidental or Institutional? Pooling Empirical Observations: Nafta an Integrative Camelot? Players Under the Microscope Conclusions/Implications

Climate Change Regionalism in North America

lobal institutions and debates about climate change governance attract consid-erable academic and media attention. The main multilateral forums are arenas forhigh-profile political negotiations, inter-state conflicts, and thousands of nongov-ernmental actors. Similarly, national climate change politics and policy are signifi-cant to decision makers and scholars, and local and urban climate change activismand planning also draw notable interest. However, outside the European Union(EU), much less analytical and political attention is paid to issues and possibilities ofregional-level climate change governance—despite the fact that regional coopera-tion and institutional arrangements offer a multitude of political, economic, andenvironmental benefits not readily available in local, national, or global settings(Balsiger & VanDeveer, 2010; Jordan, Huitema, Van Asselt, Rayner, & Berkhout,2010; Patt, 2009). Furthermore, regional policy making around economic integra-tion and trade has proliferated in recent decades, resulting in scholarly and politicaldebates about the complementarities and conflicts between global and regionaltrade initiatives, state sovereignty, and democratic governance (Kuhnhardt, 2010;Laursen, 2003).Even as North American trade and economic integration deepened significantlyover the last 20 years, little public debate about regional options for better climatechange and energy governance has followed. In fact, few leading North Americannationalpoliticians—someinCanadaandMexicobutpracticallynoneintheUnitedStates—have paid serious attention to continental alternatives for reducing green-house gas (GHG) emissions and addressing adaptation needs, even as the dynamicnature of multilevel climate change governance driven by subnational policy lead-ership across the continent is growing (Selin & VanDeveer, 2009a, 2009b) However,it is possible to identify potential benefits for North American countries of morecoordinated action across Canadian, U.S., and Mexican public and private sectorentities. Furthermore, global GHG emissions cannot be adequately reduced—andthe goal of keeping average global temperatures from increasing more than 2°Cover preindustrial levels cannot be met—without significant cuts in North Americanemissions.This viewpoint article intends to stimulate both scholars and practitioners toengage in more serious reflection and critical debate about opportunities forfurther coordinated North American responses to climate change. It draws atten-

Mexican migration, transnationalism, and the re-scaling of citizenship in North America

This article contributes to recent scholarship on the relationship between globalization, human mobility and citizenship rights. The article focuses empirically on the Mexican state's efforts at revamping, promoting and gaining recognition within the United States for a high security consular identification card in the period since 11 September 2001. These efforts are situated within the context of Mexico's broader extra-territorial nation-building project, which encourages migrants' continuing presence abroad and their simultaneous incorporation in social, political and economic institutions in both the US and Mexico. The successes of the efforts are attributed to the skilful political strategizing and lobbying undertaken by consular officials and the role of migrant remittances in the neoliberal project of North American economic integration.

Intimate ties, bitter struggles: the United States and Latin America since 1945

Over the last sixty years, the relationship between the United States and Latin America has been marred by ideological conflict, imbalances of power, and economic disparity. The U.S.-sponsored coup in Guatemala, the near lynching of Vice President Richard Nixon in Venezuela, and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion are a few reminders of the sometimes dramatic confrontations between North and South. Yet this relationship has also been characterized by accelerating economic and cultural interdependence that is significantly altering the old paradigm of U.S. hegemony and Latin American resistance. Alan McPherson uses multinational sources to survey and analyze the history of this relationship. Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles reflects the most up-to-date research on state-to-state interactions and recognizes the influence of culture and non-state actors on international relations. Major topics include the debate over economic dependency, the U.S. response to revolutions in Latin America during the Cold War, military interventions and covert operations, human rights, migration, the North American Free Trade Agreement and economic integration, the Iran-Contra affair, the war on drugs, and Latinos in the United States. The author's concise narrative and selection of primary-source documents offer an ideal introduction to U.S.-Latin American relations for students and for anyone with an interest in understanding the dynamic interplay between these hemispheric neighbors.

Path Dependency and the Allocation of Public Investment in Mexico

The distribution of public investment within federal states is often subject to significant political discretion. Yet one of the possible consequences of such discretion is the appearance of path dependency in the way in which public investment is distributed. Mexico offers a unique example of the effect of path dependency in resource allocation, as there has been no political competition over more than seventy years. The authors seek to examine the dynamic structure of the regional distribution of public investment empirically, to test for the existence of path dependency and the influence of the different federal governments in Mexico. They use time-series intervention analysis methodology to study the structure of, and the influence of government change in the allocation of, public investment in Mexico between 1971 and 1999. Findings suggest the existence of path dependency in the distribution of public investment in Mexico during all except for the most recent governments. In other words, federal government change made little difference to the way in which public investment was allocated. Path dependency was only broken in the 1990s, coinciding with the setting up of the North American economic integration process, which in turn led to the loss of public support for the single political party, the Partido Revolitcionario Institucional or PRI, which had been in power in Mexico over the last seventy years.

NAFTA revisited: achievements and challenges

NAFTA entered into force in 1994 after a bitter Congressional debate. But NAFTA in operation has proved no less controversial than NAFTA before ratification, for both supporters and opponents of trade liberalization have cited experience with the agreement to justify their positions. To provide a factual basis for this ongoing debate, the authors evaluate NAFTA's performance since its inception, comparing actual experience with both the objectives of the agreement's supporters and the charges of its critics. They examine future challenges and opportunities in the trade and investment relationships among the three partner countries and the broader implications for new trade initiatives throughout the hemisphere. Chapter 1 describes trade, investment, and macroeconomic developments under NAFTA, beginning inauspiciously with the Mexican economic crisis of 1994 but moving on to impressive growth in trilateral trade and Mexican GDP. Chapter 2 traces the implementation of NAFTA's dispute settlement provisions and the progress to date in implementing reforms. Chapter 3 distills and updates the findings from NAFTA and the Environment: Seven Years Later and recommends how to improve the performance of NAFTA's institutions in addressing environmental problems. Chapter 4 undertakes a similar assessment of the operations of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation and the impact of NAFTA on employment and wages in the region. Chapters 5 and 6 examine integration in the North American auto and energy markets. The final chapter looks forward and focuses on the challenges facing North American economic integration on important issues such as immigration, environment, energy, and exchange rates.

North American Economic Integration and the Challenges Wrought by 9/11

The so-called new institutional economics (NIE) has generated important insights in a range of fields including transactions cost economics, property rights law, and economic development. However, the majority of the literature in this field has focused on microeconomic institutions and their impact on economic decision making. Very little of it has attempted to apply the lessons of NIE to broader macroeconomic contexts or to international relations generally. The purpose of this article is to try and apply some of the insights of the NIE to recent events in North American economic integration, and suggest how the NIE could be employed to better understand the impact institutional changes to security since September 11, 2001 are having on economic decision-makers and patterns of North American integration.

How are Canadian Regions Adjusting to a Larger and More Integrated North American Market?

This paper relates to two understudied, but increasingly important concerns: the measurement of regional integration, and the regional benefits to North American economic integration. The objective is to measure Canada's regional integration in manufacturing industries with that of the United States, and examine the regional impact of growing trade integration on productivity growth and select other economic performance variables. Our research shows that Canada and each of its regions are becoming more integrated in trade in manufactures with the United States-but Ontario is much more integrated than the rest of Canada. While all regions have benefited through improved productivity performance, higher wages and higher output growth, Ontario has been the principal beneficiary. No evidence was found that increased trade integration in manufactures with the United States caused anything more than short-run adjustment losses in employment. Canada and each of its regions have expanded their share of North American manufacturing which stands in sharp contrast to the supposition that it would be the United States that would experience a growth in North American production share (Krugman, 1980).

Sharing a continent: Security, insecurity, and the politics of “intermesticity”

This article examines the current environment for cross‐border relations and ongoing North American economic integration. Cross‐border relations are seen as a “two‐level game” in which policy makers attempt to balance competing domestic interests with the formation of compatible cross‐border coalitions capable of reconciling policy differences. Absent a strategic policy consensus, their focus reverts to its default mode: the management of discrete issues through decentralized institutions and networks of established relationships among policy‐makers and related interests. Security continues to trump trade facilitation. Canada‐US cooperation on border issues risks being ambushed by unresolved US‐Mexico conflicts and their echoes in US domestic politics. The most promising response to these circumstances is a persistent commitment to purposeful incrementalism until senior decision‐makers in each country have accumulated enough political capital to embark on a more ambitious agenda.

La collaboration scientifique et technologique en Amérique du Nord : un point de vue Canadien

Canada, as a country with a small, open economy, faces the immediate challenge of learning to shape dynamic comparative advantage in the emerging international economy. About 75 % of Canada's trade linkages are with the United States, and a very large component of the Canadian experience of « globalization » is driven by North American economic integration. This integration is taking place in the absence of institutions and policy mechanisms to promote and manage science, technology, and innovation relations on a continental scale. Bilateral s & T arrangements centered on the United States presently characterize the North American innovation System. Circumstances in North America pose three sets of challenges to Canadian s & T policy. 1) Science and technology are increasing in importance in international trade, environmental, and social/cultural matters. This means that Canada must learn to improve its management of an increasingly internationalized domestic s & T System. 2) Canada must cultivate mutually beneficial bilateral s & T relationships with its two partners in NAFTA, Mexico and the United States. 3) Canada must identify where its interests lie in the development and governance of trilateral and international rules and arrangements for science, technology, and innovation.

The Inevitability of Integration? Neoliberal Discourse and the Proposals for a New North American Economic Space after September 11

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had an immediate impact on Canada–U.S. relations. Whereas security became foremost among U.S. concerns, Canada became preoccupied with ensuring that the newly fortified border would not impede trade. Within days of the attacks, Canadian analysts argued that the only way to guarantee open access to U.S. markets would be to negotiate some form of deeper North American economic integration. Previous proposals for a North American Monetary Union were revived, while new initiatives such as a customs union or a “strategic bargain” also emerged. These schemes were designed to forge a “new economic space” in North America. Business think tanks and interest groups played a central role in pushing forward a platform of deeper integration, but the ideas have also made their way into the policy platforms of the Canadian federal government. This paper draws upon discourse analysis and theories of governmentality to interrogate the rhetoric of inevitability that has underpinned these proposals. The fatalism has been justified by allusions to the shifting North American geopolitical relations in the post-September 11 context and the fear and risk that have prevailed since the terrorist attacks. It also, however, resonates more broadly with neoliberal and globalizing narratives that externalize and naturalize market forces, and, therefore, limit alternative futures. More importantly, the logic and language of inevitability have provided advocates of deeper integration with a strategic manoeuvre to downplay concerns regarding the loss of political sovereignty and the transformations to state-society relationships that would result from the new North American economic space that is being imagined.

Drawing lines in sand and snow: border security and North American economic integration

Drawing lines in sand and snow: border security and North American economic integration