Governance in the NAFTA, or Lack Thereof?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lack thereof? One of the most important, and persistent, critiques of the NAFTA, which has already been touched on several times, is that it lacks a robust institutional structure. However, the NAFTA is not without governance institutions. Indeed, the NAFTA as a whole can be considered a set of institutions, since the rules it establishes, the trade it frees through tariff liberalization and the affirmation of concepts such as national treatment around a host of issue areas are by definition forms of governance. In fact, until it was recently rediscovered and popularized as behavioural economics, the niche discipline of institutional economics focused on the impact of the “scaffolding” of both formal and informal rules in structuring the behaviour of economic decision-makers. This analytical approach to the study of institutions has included everything from the theory of the firm (its organizational structure) to how legal institutions structure the long-term macroeconomic performance of countries and regions (Coase 1937; Williamson 1998; de Soto 2001). As Douglass North writes, Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights) … Institutions provide the incentive structure of an economy; as that structure evolves, it shapes the direction of economic change towards growth, stagnation, or decline. (North 1991: 97) Under these terms, the NAFTA certainly qualifies as a set of institutions. However, when critics of the NAFTA argue that the agreement lacks enough of an institutional structure, they are, first, talking about the design of “formal” institutions and, second, whether they pool enough sovereignty within them to act as the arbiters of disputes around a broader set of rules. The domestic rule of law is, of course, enforceable via the state’s monopoly over the exercise of coercive power. This volume has already noted in several places the ways in which enforcement power between states is less readily found, among them the discussion of foreign direct investment and the historical absence of the rule of law governing flows.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".