NAFTA's Promise and Reality
On the heels of NAFTA's 10th anniversary, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report concluding that the North American Free Trade Agreement failed to generate substantial job growth in Mexico, hurt hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers there and had "minuscule" net effects on jobs in the United States.
This report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace examines the impact of NAFTA after ten years. The report asks:
- whether NAFTA has achieved-or is on track to achieve-its policy objectives;
- what impact it has had on the lives and livelihoods of North Americans, particularly Mexicans; and
- what lessons can be drawn for future trade policy for the US and for developing countries that negotiate trade pacts with the US.
To answer these questions, the authors looked beyond the two headline figures that have typically been used to measure the impact of NAFTA: the increase in the volume of trade between the countries and the increase in the flow of foreign investment.
NAFTA's Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere (.pdf)
by John J. Audley, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Sandra Polaski, and Scott Vaughan (2004)