The FTAA as a Three-level Bargaining Game

Resumen

This paper applies Putnam’s (1993) seminal work on negotiations as a two level game, to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations process. The paper compares the domestic ratification processes with the existing web of regional and bilateral trade agreements for insights into the relative bargaining strength and key issues for the most important economies in the hemisphere: the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Mexico. This paper delivers important insights into how the existing international and domestic legal and political context will affect the dynamic shape of FTAA negotiations, with the aim of finding strategies by which Latin American countries (LACs) can maximize their bargaining power.