| The United States engagement in nonreciprocal preferential trade arrangements has been proliferating with several developing countries throughout the past couple of decades. One of the oldest and more successful of these arrangements has been the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).The CBI is a general term used to refer to the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act of 1983 (CBERA), the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Expansion Act of 1990 (CBERA Expansion Act), and the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership of 2000 (CBTPA) (Ozden and Sharma 2006). The central premise behind the plan was that, by encouraging the CBI countries to become more open and liberal, trade would expand – and eventually translate into economic development and growth (Deere, 1990). The... |
