Losses for Three Nations: The NAFTA Scorecard
Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014
Losses for Three Nations
The NAFTA Scorecard
by PETE DOLACK
The North American Free Trade Agreement has been a lose-lose-lose proposition for working people in Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Let us count the ways: Lost jobs, reduced wages, more unemployment, higher food prices and reversals of environmental laws. NAFTA, a 20-year laboratory for mainstream economics, has been a bonanza for the executives of multi-national corporations, and that is all you need to know why the so-called “free trade” model continues to be promoted despite the immiseration and dislocation it spawns. Agreements like NAFTA, and proposed deals that would go further in handing power to corporate executives and financiers such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, have little to do with trade and much with ensuring corporate wish lists are brought to life.
Not dissimilar to medieval doctors who insisted that having leeches bleed the patient was the only course of action, neoclassical economists, who dominate the field, won’t budge from their prescriptions of neoliberal austerity. But although the medical field has made enormous strides in recent centuries, there is no such progress among neoclassical economists. That is because said economists — most often under the banner of “Chicago School” but sometimes using other names — promote ideology on behalf of the powerful, not science for all humanity.
Thus the spectacularly wrong predictions made for NAFTA before it was went into force on January 1, 1994, have no effect on their predictions for new deals. To provide one example, in 1993 the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted 170,000 jobs would be created in the U.S. alone by 1995, that the U.S. would enjoy an expanded trade surplus with Mexico and that the Mexican economy would grow by four to five percent annually under NAFTA.
As we will see presently, none of those rosy predictions came close to becoming reality. (True to neoliberal form, the institute is grandly predicting “gains of $1.9 trillion” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.) The point here isn’t to pick on one particular institution — in fact, it is quite typical. The models developed to make these predictions and explain economics are mathematical constructs disconnected from the real world.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/the-nafta-scorecard/