The making of NAFTA : how the deal was done /

Cameron (Univ. of British Columbia) and Tomlin (Carleton Univ., Canada) have written an excellent book on the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), arguably the most successful foreign policy initiative of the Clinton administration. Against heavy lobbying from its core protectionist constituency--organized labor--the Clinton team finished what the Bush administration had started and concluded the most important regional free-trade initiative since the formation of the European Common Market over four decades earlier. Today most economists see the impact of NAFTA as an unqualified success. US employment has been booming, Canada has unquestionably done better than it would have without this initiative, and the impact on Mexico has been most dramatic of all. This volume provides a blow-by-blow account of the deal itself and how it was done, constructed from public sources and interviews with those actually involved. Sure, some things could have been done better--for example in the financial services sector and the dispute-settlement machinery--but some of these were addressed later, notably after the Mexican financial crisis of 1994-95. Excellent index; comprehensive bibliography. Highly recommended for college and university library collections, lower-division undergraduate and up. I. Walter; New York University