The European Union (EU) and MERCOSUR are the largest and most influential regions, both by population and in terms of size of the economy, of their respective continents. The renewed priority given to biregional cooperation launched by the Inter-Regional Framework Agreement signed in 1995 is...

The centrifugal forces of economic globalization in the 1990's ran parallel with centripetal forces of regionalization. While seemingly pulling in opposite directions, the two forces reflected complementary dimensions of dynamic capitalist market development. The completion of the Uruguay Round...

Las fuerzas centrífugas de la globalización económica en los años noventa circularon paralelas con las centrípetas de la regionalización. Aunque aparentemente parecían dirigirse en direcciones opuestas, las dos fuerzas reflejaban dimensiones complementarias del dinámico desarrollo del...

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) process was launched during the Miami Summit of Heads of State in December 1994. It was the centerpiece of a broader hemispheric initiative of political and socio-economic cooperation among 34 countries of the Americas with the objective to negotiate a...

The decade of the 1990s has witnessed a wave of regional integration initiatives in Latin America: more than 14 agreements -free trade areas or customs unions- since 1990 with a handful more in varying degrees of negotiation (see Table 1). However, this was not just a Latin American phenomenon,...

The 1990s witnessed the parallel forces of globalization and regionalization strongly at work. While seemingly contradictory, they are in fact complementary aspects of market development. This paper will focus on the latter, and its special aspects of regionalism; i.e., policy driven regional...

Trade has become an increasingly important strategic objective for developing countries. This is a relatively new phenomenon for many of them. Hence the demand to intensify an insertion into the world economy often advances faster than their institutional capacities to formulate effective...

The FTAA process itself has already generated important positive externalities for the hemisphere and the multilateral system. It has provided a regular forum in which 34 countries'; trade delegations have gotten to personally know each other better on a first name basis. This increasing...

This paper takes seriously the recent claim made by Ethier [1998] that the "New Regionalism" reflects the success of the multilateral trading system, not its failure. In fact, the New Regionalism represents a qualitative departure of the old regionalism in several respects, in particular, its...

There is a growing interest related to the theoretical analysis of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Nevertheless, there has been as yet very little empirical research on the topic, in particular, on the negotiating dynamics of these types of agreements. This paper attempts to make a contribution in...