ALBERTA’S EXPORT EXPERIENCE UNDER FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS, 1989-2008: TWENTY YEARS OF FREE TRADE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The period of free trade from 1989 to 2008 coincided with a strong expansion of Alberta’s exports. Our review shows that several factors contributed to this success. In addition to favorable trends in energy and commodity prices, the improved access to the US and Mexican markets that resulted from the CUSFTA and NAFTA are shown to be major causes of the positive development of Alberta’s exports. In particular, the significant increase in manufacturing exports can be attributed to the free trade agreements because manufacturing products face higher tariffs in export markets than do raw materials and energy products. Alberta’s manufacturing sector, therefore, emerges as a major beneficiary of freer trade. As a result, Alberta’s economy has become more diversified into higher value-added export products. Even though this diversification is still related to the energy sector, it represents increased technological sophistication and human-capital intensity, and this is welcome. Alberta’s export success has made it more dependent on NAFTA markets and, therefore, more susceptible to economic downturns originating in the US, as recent experience has shown. Protectionism and difficulties at the US border are the challenges that now loom. Yet, the opportunities that freer trade brought and that led to Alberta’s export success over the last 20 years have been a very good news story for all Albertans. The benefits of freer trade are, of course, much higher than just the additional export revenue and the related job creation. A full compilation of the benefits of freer trade would have to include the increased purchasing power of Alberta households that derived from access to lower priced imported products. That task, however, is beyond our mandated focus on exports.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".