“Unfortunately, NAFTA has not been what was expected to be, especially for Mexico, as none of the five objectives that were presented have taken place due to the fact that after it was signed, there was no strategy in place to achieve these goals,” expressed Arnulfo R. Gomez, Economics Professor at Anahuac University.

The international consultant signaled that the project must establish a Free Trade area in North America, in what would be the world’s largest market, with a population of close to 400 million people, which would generate a gross regional product of more than $9 billion dollars (1994), was visionary. “Unfortunately, the expected commercial and productive integration did not happen because Mexico was not able to define a strategy to seize its comparative advantages, instead started to compulsively sign free trade agreements. Also was also not able to seize its comparative advantages to increase competitiveness or create a policy competitiveness that would allow it to compete with the rest of the objectives. These included the increase of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the region, increasing FDI flows towards Mexico, creating jobs, and lastly, generating jobs or elevating the Mexican population’s quality of life,” he underlined.

Between 2001 and 2016, NAFTA was the block that lost the most, as its GDP fell from representing 36.29% of the world’s GDP to only 28.37%. Mexico is the country that has lost the most by having its participation fall 34.4% with regards to generating world wealth, the United States fell 21.97% and Canada 6.82%. “

Arnulfo R. Gómez
Professor of Mexico Anahuac University

According to Gomez, during NAFTA’s first 23 years, Mexico lived in an ideal comfort zone for the country to develop, nevertheless, this didn’t happen. Since 2001, the various recessions in all economic variables have been enormous due to the lack of realistic public policies which did not allow the country to maintain competitiveness of the systematic framework, and as a result, Mexico’s competitiveness fell from 34th place in 1998 to 51st in 2016. This was due to the horrible quality of the public institutions which decreased from 56th to 116th position, paperwork and regulations from 117th to 118th, the trust of the authorities and Mexican politicians from 94th to 124th as a consequence of the inability of public servants to generate realistic public policies that had a positive impact in the country’s development.... Continue reading article here

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