Mexico’s 1982 announcement that it would be unable to make its debt payment set off Latin America’s “Lost Decade.” All over the region, economies stagnated and millions of people suffered. The international response, spearheaded by the United States, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, initiated market reforms that would cut state spending, privatize state-run industries, dismantle tariffs, and construct free trade agreements. The neoliberal era had been launched. The reforms and trade agreements that accompanied this new era reflected continued U.S. hegemony but also the ways in which economic power was supplanting military power. Latin America initially found few alternatives to the neoliberal model. At the end of the twentieth century Latin American economies were growing once again, but in many cases they were only returning to where they had been before the crash. With millions feeling economic pain, neopopulist leaders gained momentum. Commitment to free trade agreements also waned as leaders like Donald Trump questioned their benefits. This chapter explores the region’s political economy of the last 50 years.

This chapter explores the rhetorical framing of GSCs in US politics in the context of rising inequality and shifting geopolitics. A growing body of international political economy has focused on the distributional consequences of globalization for demographic groups in the global North and South, and this chapter looks at how political actors’ interpretations of GSCs have framed contemporary debates over trade. The chapter analyzes the debate over trade centered on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement during the 2016 US presidential primary and general election campaigns. When expressing their support for or opposition to the TPP, candidates largely relied on conventional protectionist and liberal framings of trade. With a handful of exceptions, the specificities of GSCs were absent from the political debate surrounding the TPP on the presidential campaign trail, despite the dominance of GSCs in the trade relationships covered by the treaty. Nonetheless, the effect of supply chains on international trade was implicitly reflected in candidates’ identification of the uneven distributional consequences of contemporary trade policies.

This chapter takes stock of the dense network of trade agreements in services that has evolved in the East Asian region, and considers some of its prospects in the wake of the withdrawal of the United States from the TPP negotiations. Perhaps surprising for a region associated with booming economies, trade agreements in Asia have not always been driven by economic considerations. At the same time, it remains unclear if services trade has been as much a factor in trade agreement formation as in other regions. Based on DESTA data, the chapter shows that services trade (at least in its cross-border and consumption abroad modes) and PTA formation go hand-in-hand in Asia as well, even though the panoply of agreements remains divided by two different and possibly incompatible approaches, as some countries prefer positive lists and others prefer negative lists. With the United States choosing to withdraw from regional PTA projects for the time being, the positive-list approach looks to be the most common in the near future, while liberalization prospects may be limited.

After three decades of companionship, investment protection rules and trade agreements are heading for a divorce. Investment chapters have been included in preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) since the late 1980s, but they have recently come under fire. The U.S. administration considers privately enforceable investment protection obligations as an unwanted incentive to offshore American jobs, and the EU Commission seeks to omit them to benefit from the accelerated ratification process reserved for trade agreements that fall under exclusive EU competency. After decades of coexistence, investment protection rules and trade agreements are thus likely to go their separate ways. This chapter empirically evaluates the impact of their thirty-year companionship to assess the implications of their looming split. It finds that investment chapters remain little more than a bilateral investment treaty plugged into a trade agreement. PTIAs and self-standing investment treaties do not vary systematically in investment protection content, and the wider trade agreement context does little to affect the interpretation of investment rules in PTIAs. In spite of their coexistence in the same treaty, there is thus little evidence of cross-fertilization between trade and investment protection rules in PTIAs. This absence of normative convergence suggests that their looming split merely formalizes the continuous normative distinction between trade liberalization and investment protection.