ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book characterizes the structure of regional governance in North America, and proposes to account for that structure. An extension of these political science models of governance, through application of concepts and arguments from new institutional economics. The book presents the concept of investment-specificity as developed in scholarship on mergers and acquisitions of firms, where asymmetries are endemic. An intrinsic element in the typology of governance developed by Hooghe and Marks is the role of institutions in optimizing the transactions costs associated with exchange at every level of granularity. Moreover, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created more than twenty working groups comprised of experts and stakeholders to continue the substantive work advanced by NAFTA's requisite content areas.
