EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The effects of NAFTA on US trade, jobs, and investment, 1993–2013

Robert E. Scott
Additional contact information
Robert E. Scott: Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., USA

Review of Keynesian Economics, 2014, vol. 2, issue 4, 429-441

Abstract: Between 1993 and 2013, the US trade deficit with Mexico and Canada increased from $17.0 to $177.2 billion, displacing 851 700 US jobs. All of the net jobs displaced were due to growing trade deficits with Mexico. The number of US jobs displaced by trade deficits with Canada declined slightly between 1993 and 2013. Prominent economists and US government officials predicted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would lead to growing trade surpluses with Mexico and that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be gained. The evidence shows that the predicted surpluses in the wake of NAFTA's enactment in 1994 did not materialize. Growing trade deficits and job displacement, especially between the United States and Mexico, were the result of a surge in outsourcing of production by US and other foreign investors. The rise in outsourcing was fueled, in turn, by a surge in foreign direct investment into Mexico, which increased by more than 150 percent in the post-NAFTA period.

Keywords: North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); employment; manufacturing; US economy; Mexican economy; Canadian economy; regional economic integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 F16 N10 O24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/roke/2-4/roke.2014.04.02.xml (application/pdf)
Restricted access

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:rokejn:v:2:y:2014:i:4:p429-441

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Keynesian Economics is currently edited by Thomas Palley, Matías Vernengo and Esteban Pérez Caldentey

More articles in Review of Keynesian Economics from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Phillip Thompson ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:elg:rokejn:v:2:y:2014:i:4:p429-441