Nafta at 10: An Economic and Foreign Policy Success

摘要

In December, 1992, leaders of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico signed the historic North American Free Trade Agreement. Although NAFTA remains a lightning rod for critics of free trade, by any measure used, it has been a public policy success. As a trade agreement, it has delivered its principal objective of more trade. Since 1993, the value of two-way U.S. trade with Mexico has nearly tripled, from $81,000,000,000 to $232,000,000,000, growing twice as fast as U.S. trade with the rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are now America's number-one and -two trading partners, respectively, with Japan a distant third. One reason NAFTA remains controversial today is that advocates and opponents alike were guilty a decade ago of exaggerating its impact. Advocates claimed it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. economy due to a dramatic rise in exports; opponents claimed far more jobs would be destroyed by a flood of imports entering the U.S. and a stampede of American companies moving to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor. During a debate in 1992, presidential candidate H. Ross Perot famously predicted, "You're going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country."