NAFTA’s Job Impact Slight, Study Says
Haven’t heard that giant sucking sound? Maybe that’s because there hasn’t been one.
The North American Free Trade Agreement has not taken a substantial number of jobs from Americans, but neither has it generated the new employment its fans had promised, according to a U.S. government-funded study--the most comprehensive analysis yet of the 1994 accord.
NAFTA’s impact on U.S. jobs has been near-zero or slightly positive, researchers at UCLA found in a study to be released today.
“The impact of NAFTA and of cutting tariffs is negligible. The main factor in creating U.S. export jobs is sustaining economic growth in Mexico, and we haven’t solved that problem yet,” said Raul Hinojosa, research director at UCLA’s North American Integration and Development Center.
NAFTA, which loosened restrictions on trade among Mexico, Canada and the United States, has created about 49,000 jobs through exports to Mexico. But at the same time, imports from Mexico have taken away more than 38,000 jobs, researchers found.
On balance, NAFTA has generated only 11,000 U.S. jobs since it became law Jan. 1, 1994--an insignificant fraction of the country’s 125 million jobs.
When NAFTA was approved, the government created a program to retrain and give special unemployment benefits to people who lost jobs.
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