Three countries or one continent?

摘要

Never have Latin American leaders talked so much about regional integration as in the past decade. They have cooked up an alphabet soup of organisations, whose chefs hold non-stop summits even as trade among them grows only slowly. But three countries in the Americas have practised integration while eschewing much of the fanfare. Under the North American Free-Trade Agreement (nafta), which came into effect in January 1994, the economies of Mexico and Canada have become ever more closely entwined with that of the United States. Trade between the three has more than tripled, to $1.1 trillion in 2013, and cross-border investment has risen fourfold. Many companies now operate on a North American basis. Yet this economic entanglement has no match in politics and policy. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, set up by George W. Bush in 2005 to deepen nafta, was quietly downgraded four years later to a regular meeting of the three countries' leaders. An accompanying private-sector "competitiveness council" was disbanded.