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Impact Of Nafta On The United States

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Since the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) inception, an abundance of controversy and disagreements have surrounded it. For example, in the 2008 election, both Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton wanted to renegotiate or get out of NAFTA. Similarly, the 2016 election featured Donald Trump campaigning for the renegotiation of NAFTA. He even stated in a recent presidential debate, “…[NAFTA] was one of the worst things to ever happen to the manufacturing industry” (Bloomberg, 2016). Are these important political figures justified in their statements and campaign goals? This essay will explore the background of NAFTA as well as both its the positive and negative effects in order to determine whether NAFTA has had a net positive …show more content…

corporations to dominate Mexican Businesses.” (Personal Communications) On the flip side, both the United States and Canada were worried about manufacturing jobs migrating south to Mexico, where wages were on average one-seventh what the United States’ wages were. Despite these doubts, NAFTA negotiation continued until it was put into effect by President Bill Clinton. Now, NAFTA is the world’s largest free trade area with around 450 million people included. It also has a total gross domestic product of around 20 trillion dollars, which is larger than the economic output of all 28 countries in the European Union (Amadeo, 2017). NAFTA also had several goals when was signed. Each of these goals was outlined on the first page of the agreement. In brief, these goals were to eliminate barriers, promote fair conditions of free trade, increase investment, enforce intellectual property rights, successfully implement the agreement, and lay the groundwork for even more trade between members (NAFTA – Chapter 1 n.d.).
Many economists agree that NAFTA satisfied most if not all of its objectives. NAFTA has had a multitude of other positive effects. The first of which is decreases in price for various goods and services. This can be hard to notice unless one is looking for it due to some prices falling by mere cents. The power of slightly lower prices comes into play when aggregated over millions of purchases. According to Dr. Scott Holladay, an economics

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