This paper evaluates the influence of diverse U.S. agricultural interest groups on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under NAFTA, licenses and quotas that restricted agricultural trade between Mexico and the United States were converted to tariffs in January 1994 and all tariffs...

Aggregate and more micro data on trade between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are used to attempt to assess the early effects of Mexican entry into NAFTA. Although the fraction of Mexican trade with the U.S. and Canada has risen sharply, a number of factors have contributed to this result. Mexican...

One of the motivations for NAFTA from the US point of view was to reduce the" incentives for Mexican migration into the US. Unskilled rural males are a primary source of" illegal immigration and also Mexico's relatively abundant factor. This group should therefore" be made better off by trade...

This paper assesses the economic conditions for Asian countries to cope with the formation of EU and NAFTA. Is it desirable for them to form their own trading area? And, if desirable, is it better to have a closed one like the EAEC or a more open one like the APEC? Relying on public economics...

In this paper, we derive three lessons from Mexico's experience. First, deep reforms like trade liberalization are not likely to happen by government decree. Instead, they usually come about when the unanimous blocking of reform by powerful elites breaks down. In the case of Mexico, this...

A free trade agreement supports global free trade since trade barriers tend to divert trade in favor of members, but not reduce imports. The term: 'mutual assured deterrence' is used to refer to a regional free trade association that has the feature that no member can gain individually from the...

In this paper, I study the effect of economic integration with the United States on state-industry employment growth in Mexico. I disentangle the effects of two opposing forces on regional labor demand: transport-cost considerations, which, all else equal, encourage firms to relocate their...

Suppose that an opportunity arises for two countries to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA). Will an FTA between these countries be politically viable? And if so, what form will it take? We address these questions using a political-economy framework that emphasizes the interaction between...

A reduction in trade barriers generally will affect the environment by expanding the scale of economic activity, by altering the composition of economic activity, and by bringing about a change in the techniques of production. We present empirical evidence to assess the relative magnitudes of...

We provide a quantitative assessment of both the aggregate and the distributional effects of revoking NAFTA using a multi-country, multi-sector, multi-factor model of world production and trade with global input-output linkages. Revoking NAFTA would reduce US welfare by about 0.2%, and Canadian...