ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a systematic method to analyse the development of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). It demonstrates that while single-factor explanations may be initially productive, they may also be misleading and may even constrain one's ability to move beyond the initial insights provided by a parsimonious perspective. The chapter suggests that when used with care, theoretical arguments can be valuable policy tools. It examines APEC and focuses on NAFTA and explores the difficult task of anticipating future developments in both regions and examines the implications of the institutional nesting of NAFTA within APEC, and of APEC within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Turning first to substantive norms, the APEC view on most favoured nation is clearly a central tenet of open regionalism. Aside from the absence of an established meta-regime, the most obvious candidate to explain the weakness of the APEC regime is hegemonic stability theory.
