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This paper traces the recent evolution of North American economic and security relations within the context of broader debates in international political economy (IPE) concerning globalization and its effects on the state in the international system. Borrowing from David Lake's discussion of hierarchical sovereignty, this paper argues that efforts to meld security to economics in an integrated North American market devoid of institutions have made sovereignty more hierarchical. It presents an approach to looking at North American integration, which can assist in understanding recent developments that are suggestive of new areas of research and policy development for both practitioners and theoreticians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that since the completion of the NAFTA in the early 1990s, there has been too much focus on what governments in Ottawa, Washington, and Mexico City have or have not been doing to deepen North American integration. The NAFTA was an anomaly that obscures the larger history of incrementalism that has shaped North America's political economy. A focus on large, government-led integration projects like the NAFTA as a model for North American integration distracts from an examination of the many connections and processes taking place across borders every day. Security has become fully entrenched as a driving paradigm of North American relations. However, much of the activity in this domain and others is taking place at the bureaucratic, sub-state, and non-state levels rather than via active direction from national leadership. As scholars and analysts of North America, we would do well to move away from the NAFTA as a model for negotiating North America's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast track procedures have been key institutional mechanisms for U.S. trade policy making for nearly three decades. In April 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives made a small change to rules for considering the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement that significantly undermined fast track. However, these actions are really the culmination of the erosion of the utility of fast track in managing U.S. trade policy in the context of the challenges brought by increased openness in the global economy. Those challenges were laid bare with the first major bilateral agreement considered under fast track rules, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called new institutional economics (NIE) has generated important insights in a range of fields including transactions cost economics, property rights law, and economic development. However, the majority of the literature in this field has focused on microeconomic institutions and their impact on economic decision making. Very little of it has attempted to apply the lessons of NIE to broader macroeconomic contexts or to international relations generally. The purpose of this article is to try and apply some of the insights of the NIE to recent events in North American economic integration, and suggest how the NIE could be employed to better understand the impact institutional changes to security since September 11, 2001 are having on economic decision-makers and patterns of North American integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faults in complex tectonic environments interact in various ways, including triggered rupture of one fault by another, that may increase seismic hazard in the surrounding region. We model static and dynamic fault interactions between the strike-slip and thrust fault systems in southern California. We find that rupture of the Sierra Madre-Cucamonga thrust fault system is unlikely to trigger rupture of the San Andreas or San Jacinto strike-slip faults. However, a large northern San Jacinto fault earthquake could trigger a cascading rupture of the Sierra Madre-Cucamonga system, potentially causing a moment magnitude 7.5 to 7.8 earthquake on the edge of the Los Angeles metropolitan region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which described a modeling analysis of the geochemical evolution of a contaminated sandy aquifer at a uranium mill tailings site in the western United States. Site characteristics; Field sampling and analytical data; Speciation and solubility modeling.