Jeff Faux on Brad DeLong’s Defense of NAFTA

By Jeff Faux

Brad DeLong recently criticized an op-ed I wrote about the negative impact of the twenty-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement on American workers. The stakes here are higher and more immediate than the rehash of an old ideological dispute. This is not so much about the past as about the future. Corporate lobbyists are pushing President Obama and congressional Republicans to pass the NAFTA-like eleven-country Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP)—right after the November election. Since it took effect in 1994, NAFTA has been the template for the subsequent series of trade agreements that have accelerated the globalization of the U.S. economy. But its failure to deliver as promised has soured the public and many in Congress on so-called “free trade.” Getting lawmakers to swallow the TPP will be easier if its promoters can somehow make lemonade out of the NAFTA lemon. To start with, DeLong fails to tell the reader that he is evaluating a law he helped to produce. He worked on NAFTA when he was a deputy assistant secretary in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department...

Read rest here.

Mexico: Twenty Years of NAFTA Regret

By Mark Weisbrot

It was 20 years ago that the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico was implemented. In Washington, the date coincided with an outbreak of the bacteria cryptosporidium in the city's water supply, with residents having to boil their water before drinking it. The joke in town was, "See what happens, NAFTA takes effect and you can't drink the water here."But what about Mexico? Didn’t Mexico at least benefit from the agreement? Well if we look at the past 20 years, it’s not a pretty picture. The most basic measure of economic progress, especially for a developing country like Mexico, is the growth of income (or GDP) per person. Out of 20 Latin American countries (South and Central America plus Mexico), Mexico ranks 18, with growth of less than 1 percent annually since 1994. It is of course possible to argue that Mexico would have done even worse without NAFTA, but then the question would be, why?

Read the rest here.

Jorge Castañeda and the wrong lessons from Liberalization Reforms

Jorge Castañeda, ex-advisor to the left of center candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and ex-foreign affairs secretary in the right wing administration of Vicente Fox has written here about the need for further reforms in Mexico. He sings the praises of NAFTA.

"NAFTA brought with it a spectacular increase in Mexican exports, as well as a dramatic shift in their composition. But it proved to be a great disappointment in terms of foreign investment inflows and economic growth, which has averaged 2.6% per year over the last two decades – slower than Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Uruguay. As a result, Mexico’s income gap with the US and Canada has barely narrowed."

The change in exports was basically associated to an acceleration of the 'maquilization' process, manufacturing exports with low local value added content. No comments on the massive immigration* and the fact that neither growth nor income distribution have improved after NAFTA (both claims often made about what to expect from it from the free trade crowd).

So what should Peña Nieto do? According to Castañeda:

"Energy reform opens up electricity generation and oil exploration, extraction, and refining to private foreign or domestic investment through licenses, concessions, production sharing, or profit sharing. The oil workers’ union has been banished from the board of directors of Pemex, the national oil company, and new contracts for shale oil and gas, together with deep-water prospecting and drilling, will be signed with a government agency, not with Pemex. 

Once the myriad legal and political obstacles are cleared, Mexico will be able to increase oil and gas production, drive down the price of electricity, and stimulate growth in an otherwise lethargic economy."

In other words, deregulation, weakening of unions to attract foreign capital (more secure environment for capital, since Mexico is such a paradise for workers), and that would lead to growth. No changes from the old Washington Consensus mantra.

You would expect that the failures of "Free Trade", liberalization and deregulation were incorporated, as much as the lessons from financial deregulation in the US after the 2008 crisis, but the resilience of Neoliberal ideas, in the face of adverse evidence, is impressive indeed.

* On lack of convergence with the US and immigration Blecker and Esquivel say: "the data show that there has been no economic convergence whatsoever between Mexico and the United States since NAFTA’s enactment. As a result, the historical Mexico-US economic gap in percentage terms has not been reduced after 15 years of free trade, and the incentives to migrate are probably even greater than before." Read their assessment of NAFTA here.