Study Contends Pact Would Help State : NAFTA: Exports would climb to $20 billion, supporting 200,000 Southland jobs, White House says. Opponents’ report comes to opposite conclusion.

Stepping up its efforts to woo undecided California congressional votes, the Clinton Administration released a study Friday arguing that passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement would help boost the state’s exports to Mexico to $20 billion by 2010, supporting 200,000 jobs in Southern California alone.

The study by the Treasury Department added that failure to implement the treaty could send California-to-Mexico exports back to 1987 levels, imperiling 70,000 state jobs.

The trade agreement “is a plus, and it helps; we ought to be working on it,” Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said in an interview. “It’s not going to revive California overnight. . . . (But) if it goes down the tubes, it’s a minus for California.”

Bentsen took his case Friday to workers at General Motors Corp.’s Hughes Electronics plant in Los Angeles.

Separately, a coalition of California unions, environmental and small-business groups opposing the pact released its own study Friday that reached almost exactly the opposite conclusion: that the trade accord will result in the loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs, another 100,000 jobs in related fields and lower wages for remaining workers.

The California Fair Trade Campaign study based its estimates on past trends in corporate relocations to Mexico and an analysis of changes that would occur if the trade agreement is approved. The group argued that the pact would encourage more corporate defections.

Bentsen’s appearance and the release of the Treasury Department study are the latest efforts in a full-court press by the Clinton Administration to win approval of the agreement.

The Treasury Department paper--combining new findings with a rehash of earlier studies--argued that the accord, in combination with Mexican economic reforms, could help raise California exports to $20 billion by 2010, of which $15 billion would come from Southern California. That would support 200,000 jobs in Southern California.

But when pressed, Brad DeLong, deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, acknowledged that exports are expected to grow to $10 billion and Southern California jobs would increase to 100,000 even without the agreement. Only 100,000 additional Southern California jobs could be attributable to the treaty.

Previous studies have estimated net job growth in California under the trade agreement at between 9,600 and 34,330 by 1995. As it is, about 90,000 California jobs are attributable to exports to Mexico that now amount to $6.6 billion a year, the Commerce Department has reported.

As for the estimate that California would lose 70,000 jobs if the trade accord is defeated, that figure represents the net growth in jobs since exports have nearly tripled in California since 1987. Some economists believe that, far from falling to 1987 levels, exports from California to Mexico will continue to grow even if the pact does not take effect, unless Mexico changes the tariff rules.

Bentsen admitted that it is not clear whether Mexico would do so. But he added: “They’ll think (a defeat of the pact is) a substantial put-down, and I think you’ll get a psychological reaction as you head into the (1994 Mexican federal) election. . . . That concerns me, and we shouldn’t take that risk.”

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, took issue with the anti-NAFTA study. “It’s very bad to project future investment on the grounds of what happened in the past,” she said.