In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement laid the groundwork for today's neo-liberal global trade order. Three years later, the US government's Framework for Global Electronic Commerce enshrined minimal government intervention and industry self-regulation for the tech industry,...

This paper examines the dynamics of silver production in Mexico in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor, NAFTA 2.0. With a focus on addressing environmental externalities, the study explores the relationship between silver production, property rights...

ABSTRACTAbnormal accruals might indicate earnings management. We investigate whether Mexican companies increased their abnormal accounting accruals in the years following the adoption of the North American Free Trade agreement [NAFTA]. This issue is of regulatory importance, as it examines...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...

This chapter explores the concept of North America through various indigenous, literary, political, cultural, environmental, economic, and historical perspectives. It also focuses on North America as a region, with different borderlands separating Canada, the United States and Mexico, and...

While not appreciated at the time, the 1990s marked the high water of neoliberal economic and political themes. Globalization was widely popular, both for delivering prosperity to advanced nations and for lifting millions out of poverty in developing countries. To maximize benefits from the...

The economic history of the North American integration project can best be described as developing in fits and starts. Though there were periods of sustained cooperation, any semblance of stability would soon be disrupted by this or that new initiative announced with much fanfare by the United...

9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic were once-in-a-generation events with profound implications for US–Canada border management. Following September 11, 2001, the two countries collaborated on a border management regime that was highly integrated but also intended as a battle line in the war on...

Populism has surged in North America in recent decades, boosting Donald Trump into power. Populists criticize liberalized trade for causing a wide range of problems. Trump's victory provides us the opportunity to review populists’ complaints about trade specifically, in the concrete form of...

After three decades of adaptation to continental free trade, the North American economies are confronting significant changes in economic and technological conditions, a deteriorating geopolitical context, and rising socioeconomic pressures on trade. This chapter considers the implications of...

This chapter describes the political tides that have pushed North American trade dispute settlement preferences back and forth between multilateral and regional levels. The first section traces early approaches to the creation of a binding dispute settlement mechanism in the Canada–US Free...

The integrationist conception of Turtle Island is far from having materialized in the field of public procurement in North America. While NAFTA did contain a chapter on government procurement, this covered only a limited proportion of contracts. Above all, the hardening of protectionist trade...

Foreign direct investment from the United States had been subject to a heated debate in its two smaller North American neighbors. By the time the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being negotiated, Canada and Mexico had turned more receptive and liberal in their economic policies....

Prior to NAFTA, trade agreements were rarely the subject of widespread public debate, since the content of these agreements was seen as technocratic issues with little relevance to the lives of most people. These conditions changed with the negotiation of NAFTA, which brought together two...

The implementation of NAFTA in 1994 not only formalized many of the economic interdependencies between Mexico, Canada, and the US but also structured new mechanisms of trade and negotiation. While USMCA, which superseded NAFTA in 2020, kept many of the original agreement's provisions, it added...

Evoking Turtle Island as a metaphor for North America calls attention to how ecological diversity and connectedness are intertwined with culture, social metabolism, and power relations on the continent. The environmental provisions of NAFTA, largely an afterthought and mostly unenforceable,...

North America is an energy powerhouse with vast reserves of oil, natural gas, and critical minerals, and substantial potential to generate electricity. Canada, the United States and Mexico have the potential to become a formidable “energy bloc.” In theory, at least. In practice, economic,...

This chapter provides a historical overview of the motor vehicle industry's role in North American integration. It takes a political economy approach to explain the place of the auto industry in the emergence and evolution of continental economic integration: the sector's development in the...

This chapter is focused on the impact of North American integration on women in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It begins by describing trends in female employment and labor force participation in the region and then connects the observed changes with developments in international trade...

This chapter focuses on the positioning and restructuring of North America based on the impacts of CUSMA (Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement), which is one element of a multifaceted strategy to recalibrate the North American economic regional model within the world economic system. It...

This chapter focuses on the key elements that drive land trade in North America: the physical infrastructure of land border crossings and serving corridors, and the demand for trade steered by production and consumption patterns. The first part of the document includes a detailed description of...

The chapter examines Mexico's shifting cybersecurity landscape, highlighting its initiatives, obstacles, and cooperation within North America. Post-September 11, 2001, security gained precedence over trade, significantly impacting regional integration efforts. The growing digital connectivity...

This paper assesses the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexican manufacturing plants' output prices and markups. We distinguish between Mexican goods that are exported and those sold domestically, and decompose their prices separately into markups and marginal costs. We then...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA’s...

This paper assesses the long-run effects of the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) on the Canadian labor market using matched longitudinal administrative data for the years 1984-2004. We simultaneously examine the labor market effects of increased export expansion and import...

Does regional economic integration affect the location of economic activity inside countries? In this paper, I discuss recent academic literature on whether the movement towards free trade in North America has influenced the spatial organization of production in Canada, Mexico, or the United...

On February 24-25, 2006 an international workshop on “Regional and International Currency Arrangements” was held in Vienna. It was co-sponsored by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bank of Greece, and jointly organized by Eduard Hochreiter and George Tavlas. Academic economists and...

The U.S. economy is changing and the labor market is having trouble keeping pace. The country suffers from significant labor market mismatches in sectors ranging from technology to healthcare to manufacturing. What’s more, companies are, increasingly, creating new jobs in places that lack...

In this paper, we derive three lessons from Mexico's experience. First, deep reforms like trade liberalization are not likely to happen by government decree. Instead, they usually come about when the unanimous blocking of reform by powerful elites breaks down. In the case of Mexico, this...

Based on the preparation of a database that estimates production output numbers, working hours, and their ratios for 5 branches and 27 categories of economic activity, this article analyzes the evolution of the textile and apparel industry in Mexico in the 1994-2008 period. A shift-share type...

This paper analyses from an international trade perspective the lower-than-expected growth dividends of the export-led strategy adopted by Mexico in the 1990s. Particular attention is given to employment, labour productivity and regional outcomes. The North American Free Trade Agreement caused...

Theoretical and applied work in industrial-organization approaches to international trade typically assume either that there are fixed numbers of firms, or that there is free entry and exit with a continuum of firms. This paper makes a first step toward a more realistic approach in which firms...

The last decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of regional trade agreements (RTAs). There seems to be a general if ill-defined belief on the part of many policy-makers, and among a number of academics as well, that there is more to a RTA than the traditional gains from trade. This...

This paper considers tariff phase-outs in multilateral and preferential agreements. The paper finds that early GATT rounds primarily were over bindings of existing rates and that it was not until the 1962-67 Kennedy Round's 50% reduction in manufactured goods tariffs that time paths of tariff...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...