Negotiating and Implementing a North American Free Trade Agreement

Edelgard E. Mahant is a political sciences professor at Laurentian
University.

As tends to be the case with edited volumes, this one was sadly out of
date by the time it reached the reviewer’s hands. It consists of six
articles, four of them cast in the form of advice to the NAFTA
negotiators and two comprising speculations as to what NAFTA might
contain. These questions have now been settled (whether happily is
another issue).

The most useful and least dated chapters are the first two. Gary N.
Horlick and F. Amanda DeBusk (Chapter 1) provide a detailed legal
description of the workings of the dispute-settlement panels established
under the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

Judith H. Bello and Gilbert R. Winham (Chapter 2) offer a good history
of how the Canada–U.S. negotiations were organized. The section on how
the two governments consulted various private-sector interests is
especially interesting, given that other histories of the negotiations
have focused on either personalities or issues.

Jeffrey Schott and Gary Clyde Hufbauer (Chapter 3) speculate as to what
NAFTA might contain. Peter Morici (Chapter 4) discusses how NAFTA might
affect the horticultural and textile industries. Sven Arndt, William
Kaempfer, and Thomas Willett (Chapter 5) deal with the issues of
subsidies and countervailing duties, while Murray Smith (Chapter 6)
addresses nontariff barriers. Though dated, these four articles include
titbits of useful information. For example, Chapter 3 concludes with a
list of the NAFTA negotiating groups, while Smith’s Chapter 6 includes
a list of nontariff barriers that a student of international trade might
find interesting. In short, this is a book that is of moderate use.