On 1 July 2000 regulations to liberalize trade flows between Mexico and the European Union came into force, after more than six years of diplomatic work and complex negotiations. These regulations are part of the ¿Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLCUEM), which is also one of the components of the...

In October 2000, the twelve countries of South America launched, a multinational, multisectoral and multidisciplinary initiative, whose main objective is to develop the region's infrastructure within a context of environmental sustainability. Supported by the Inter-American Development Bank...

This paper discusses the impacts of integration on productivity, specifically within regional agreements. The paper focuses on the economies of Brazil and Mexico and on their performance in the manufacturing sector. The authors estimate firm-level productivity and test its casual links with...

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,...

Many countries are concerned by the dense body of regulations governing their preferential foreign trade and are seeking to simplify the current diversity of rules. To do this they are starting to look at alternatives that allow a degree of convergence between their agreements. This paper aims...

Economic and political integration have been a perennial and neuralgic issue in the Caribbean agenda. This paper draws on the literature on trade, growth and regional agreements to discuss the motivation behind the Caribbean drive for integration, the results obtained so far and what is in stock...

The last decade has seen a significant increase in the exports of several Latin American and Caribbean countries to destinations within and beyond the region. The increase in trade links has not, however, been accompanied by a proportional increase in reciprocal investments among the trading...

The greater openness of developing countries¿ economies and the free trade agreements negotiated in recent years have spurred arguments in favor of greater integration in the world; they have also given rise to strong opposition. In some cases the opposition stems from the reaction of specific,...