th American free trade; and (3) comparative business, economic, and social policies and practices in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
An Impetus for North AmericanFree Trade Negotiations
Within the context of international regional economic integration, there are five levels (1) free trade area, (2) customs union, (3) common market, (4) economic union, and (5) political union (Grosse and Kujawa, 1988). Each successive level involves greater integration. At the lowest level of integration, the free trade area, tariffs are eliminated on the trade between the member countries. At the next level, the customs union, common external tariffs are applied to all trade between the member countries and non member countries. The third level, the common market, moves one step further along, and permits the free flow of the factors of production among member countries. At the fourth level, economic union, monetary and fiscal harmonization among member countries is added to the common market system. The final level, political union, involves the creation of a single government over all
member countries, and the loss of national identity for the individual member states of the union.
In the contemporary international environment, a fact often overlooked is that the United States is the most successful example of regional economic and political integration. The changing international environment in the last years of the twentieth century, however, has rendered the American integration as too narrow in geographic scope, as other regional integration schemes threaten to both dwarf and isolate the United States (Thompson, 1990). The oldest and most successful of these other regional integrations is the European Economic Community (EEC).
The EEC was created with the signing of a treaty in Rome in 1957, by Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Nederlands (Paxton, 1991). The long term...