Unfortunately, that's where the easy assessments of the deal's effects end. From to , the U. Canada's per-capita GDP grew In other words, Mexico's output per person has grown more slowly than that of Canada or the U.
Normally, one would expect an emerging market economy's growth to outpace that of developed economies. Does that mean that Canada and the U.
Perhaps, but if so, why did Trump debut his campaign in June with, "When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically"? Because, in a way, Mexico does beat the U. NAFTA is an enormous and enormously complicated deal.
Looking at economic growth can lead to one conclusion while looking at the balance of trade leads to another. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. It fell steadily from to , and while it picked up following the tech bubble's burst, it did not reach its pre-NAFTA level again until October The fallout from the financial crisis kept it above 6.
The partially union-funded Economic Policy Institute estimated that by , , net jobs were displaced by the U. The automotive industry is usually considered to be one of the hardest-hit by the agreement. But although the U. Jobs began to slip away at that point, and losses grew steeper with the financial crisis. At its low in June , American auto manufacturing employed just , people.
Anecdotal evidence supports the idea that these jobs went to Mexico. Wages in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the U.
All major American car makers now have factories south of the border, and prior to Trump's Twitter campaign against offshoring , a few were openly planning to ship more jobs abroad. Yet while the job losses are tough to deny, they may be less severe than in a hypothetical NAFTA-less world. They now straddle the border. While thousands of U. By integrating supply chains across North America, keeping a significant share of production in the U. Otherwise, they may have been unable to compete with Asian rivals, causing even more jobs to depart.
On the other hand, it may be impossible to know what would have happened in a hypothetical scenario. Garment manufacturing is another industry that was particularly hard-hit by offshoring. The country was still behind other international manufacturers including:. During the same period, however, apparel prices fell 7. Still, the decline in garment prices is no easier to pin directly on NAFTA than the decline in garment manufacturing. Because people with lower incomes spend a larger portion of their earnings on clothes and other goods that are cheaper to import than to produce domestically, they would probably suffer the most from a turn towards protectionism —just as many of them did from trade liberalization.
According to a study by Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit K. The number of Mexican immigrants—of any legal status—living in the U. Boosters argued that uniting the U. Mexico's president at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortiari, said the country would "export goods, not people. Instead, the number of Mexican immigrants more than doubled, again from to when it approached 9. According to Pew , the flow has reversed—at least temporarily. Between and , , more Mexicans left the U. One reason NAFTA did not cause the expected reduction in immigration was the peso crisis of to , which sent the Mexican economy into recession.
Another is that reducing Mexican corn tariffs did not prompt Mexican corn farmers to plant other, more lucrative crops. This prompted them to give up farming. A third is that the Mexican government did not follow through with promised infrastructure investments, which largely confined the pact's effects on manufacturing to the north of the country. While the U. The U. Its merchandise trade balance is negative—the U. In fact, the two countries already had a free trade agreement in place since , but the pattern holds—the U.
A report by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the deal "increased annual U. GDP, but by a very small amount—probably no more than a few billion dollars, or a few hundredths of a percent.
While the economy as a whole may have seen a slight boost, certain sectors and communities experienced profound disruption. A town in the Southeast loses hundreds of jobs when a textile mill closes, but hundreds of thousands of people find their clothes marginally cheaper. Depending on how you quantify it, the overall economic gain is probably greater but barely perceptible at the individual level; the overall economic loss is small in the grand scheme of things, but devastating for those it affects directly.
The deal was, in a fact, an extension of the Canada-U. Free Trade Agreement, and it was the first to link an emerging market economy to developed ones. The country underwent tough reforms, beginning a transition from the kind of economic policies that one-party states pursue to free-market orthodoxy. NAFTA supporters argued that tying the economy in with those of its richer northern neighbors would lock in those reforms and boost economic growth, eventually leading to convergence in living standards between the three economies.
A currency crisis struck almost immediately. Between the fourth quarter of and the second quarter of , local-currency GDP shrank by 9. Despite President Salinas's prediction that the country would begin exporting "goods, not people," emigration to the U.
Due to growth in other agricultural sectors, the net loss was 1. CEPR argues that Mexico could have achieved per-capita output on par with Portugal's if its growth rate had held. Instead, it clocked the 18th-worst rate of 20 Latin American countries, growing at an average of just 0. The country's poverty rate was almost unchanged from to NAFTA appears to have locked in some of Mexico's economic reforms: The country has not nationalized industries or run up massive fiscal deficits since the to recession.
But changes to the old economic models were not accompanied by political changes—at least not immediately. These and other industries owe their growth in part to the more than a four-fold real increase in U. They have also contributed to the growth of a small, educated middle class: Mexico had around nine engineering graduates per 10, people in , compared to seven in the U.
The increase in Mexican imports from the U. Canada experienced a more modest increase in trade with the U. Unlike Mexico, it does not enjoy a trade surplus with the U. While it sells more goods to the U. As with the U. The declaration of war against the Mexican government leads to days of fighting and dozens of deaths before the rebels retreat into the jungle.
In sensitive sectors such as sugar, NAFTA stipulates that trade barriers would only gradually be phased out, which was designed to smooth economic shocks in vulnerable industries. By this time, trade within the three North American nations has more than tripled.
A second round of talks takes place in Mexico in September. That puts pressure on Canada to agree to new terms on auto trade and dispute settlement rules to remain part of the pact. The deal must still be ratified in each country. April 2, U. May 17, The United States lifts tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico, removing a major obstacle to legislative approval of the trade pact.
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