To Trade or Not to Trade: NAFTA and the Prospects for Free Trade in the Americas

Lakshmi Iyer

Chapter 13 in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in Emerging Markets, 2016, pp 353-400 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: January 1, 2004 marked the 10th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A decade after this landmark trade agreement was signed by the United States, Canada and Mexico, there was considerable debate whether it had been good for the countries that signed it. U.S. President George W. Bush said that NAFTA had “created jobs and lifted lives,” but Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry insisted that the treaty needed to be “fixed and adjusted.” Critics of NAFTA in the United States claimed that it had caused a loss of 750,000 manufacturing jobs to Mexico, lowered U.S. wage levels, undercut American environmental laws and caused a “tremendous collapse” in Canada's social welfare infrastructure. Neither were all Mexicans in agreement with President Vicente Fox, who claimed that NAFTA “has been successful for Mexico.” A poll conducted in Mexico City found that 44 percent of adults disapproved of NAFTA and that 83 percent felt that the United States had benefited the most from it. Tens of thousands of Mexican farmers thronged the streets of the capital in early 2003 to demand a review of the agricultural provisions in NAFTA…

Keywords: Emerging Markets; Economic Institutions; Property Rights; Economic Policy; Political Institutions; Political Economy; Economic Growth; Case Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814719766_0013 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814719766_0013 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

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:wsi:wschap:9789814719766_0013

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().