The State of North American Integration

This piece offers an overview of the state of North American integration as of 2003, but goes further to construct an index of integration, so that the analysis has greater relevance for those who want to do comparative analysis with other integrating regions, most notably Europe. Rather than focusing purely on trade flows, which classic analyses of regional integration use as their bellwether measure, the authors instead look at infrastructure, and argue that if anything, North America is perhaps more integrated as an economic system than Europe.