Trade, regional integration, Mercosur, NAFTA

Maurice Schiff

English

Research Papers in Economics

TOPICS  IN  THE  ECONOMICS  OF  INTEGRATION  IN  THE  AMERICAS*
The first article in this section, by Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga
and Isidro Soloaga, tries to identify whether information generated in one export
market can help Mercosur members increase exports to third markets through
information spillovers, and whether the creation of Mercosur has helped in this
regard. The authors find that such information spillovers do exist, but that regio-
nal tariff preferences did not enhance the role of Mercosur as an export platform
for Argentina and Brazil, enhanced it for Paraguay and hurt Uruguay.
Julio Nogués, in his article, argues that Mercosur members are especially
hurt by the North’s protectionism because they are efficient producers of the most
protected products in the world, namely agricultural and agro-industrial products.
The author shows how these costs rise with the number of regional agreements of
which they are excluded. This is particularly worrying given the failure of the Doha
negotiations to liberalize the North’s agricultural protectionism.
Glenn Harrison, Thomas Rutherford and David Tarr have derived “rules of
thumb” from the application of a number of computable general equilibrium models
to inform policy makers in countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America on the
welfare effects of regional arrangements, with a clear recognition that these rules
of thumb may not hold for some modeling variants. This paper offers a summary of
their findings for the Americas.
In the last paper, Maurice Schiff and Yanling Wang examine the separate
effects on Mexico’s TFP of trade-related technology diffusion from the US and
Canada, on the one hand, and from the rest of the OECD, on the other. They find
that the impact of the former is much larger than that of the latter (with even trade
diversion having a positive impact on TFP) and that NAFTA has resulted in some
convergence of Mexico’s economy to those of the US and Canada.
Cuadernos de Economía, Año 40, Nº 121, pp. 441 (diciembre 2003)
Keywords: Trade, Regional Integration, Mercosur, NAFTA
JEL Classification: F15
* This introduction was written by Maurice Schiff, The World Bank.
Email: Mschiff@worldbank.org
Introduc. MSchiff.pm6 2/12/03, 9:43 441

Topics in the Economics of Integration in the Americas - Introduction

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Topics in the Economics of Integration in the Americas - Introduction

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