This weekend President Bush will meet with leaders of 34 nations in Quebec City to promote a free trade area that would extend from Chile up to Alaska. How would the expansion of trade affect the United States? What impact would it have on life in Latin America?
William Ratliff is a Research Fellow and the Curator of the Americas, International, and Peace Collections at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
His current research is on the legal foundation of reform in the developing world, political and economic reform in Latin America, and U.S. foreign policy.
Ratliff is the author of many books, including (with Buscaglia) Law and Economics in Developing Countries (2000).
He has met with and interviewed more than twenty foreign presidents and prime ministers, and has published articles and commentaries from dozens of countries, including Panama, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.
Ratliff also wrote from Cuba during the 25th anniversary of Castro's revolution, and he has written from the war zones of Nicaragua and El Salvador for the Chicago Tribune.
Ed Buscaglia is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and is the Director of the International Law and Economic Development Center at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Buscaglia is an expert on the impact of legal and judicial frameworks on economic development and integration. His current research focuses on the factors affecting legal and economic integration in developing countries; on the causes of public sector corruption; on the intellectual property rights in developing countries; and on the economic analysis of the judicial sector in civil law countries.
A few of Buscaglia's most recent publications include "An Economic Analysis of Institutional Integration in the Americas" (2001), "An Economic Analysis of Legal Harmonization in Latin America" (2001), and Law and Economics in Developing Countries (with William Ratliff).
