From NAFTA to USMCA: power, path dependence, and protectionism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) shaped the preferences and available choices of negotiators and stakeholders during its renegotiation in 2017-19, leading to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). This thesis first examines the reasons behind the US demand for institutional change. Drawing on structuralist economics, it develops a typology of US trade policies since WWII based on the global South's access to the US market and policy space. US trade policy evolved from ‘magnanimous’ (1944-70) to ‘competitive’ (1971-1990) to ‘restraining’ (1991-2016) as the US reacted to disruptions caused by import competition. Since 2017, US trade policy globally has shifted to ‘power-based’ as a reaction to the restraining policy, symbolised by the WTO and NAFTA, which encouraged offshoring by stabilising access to the US market and restricting trading partners’ policy space. Paradoxically, USMCA largely preserved US restraining policy regionally, although uncertainty is institutionalised by the inclusion of review periods and a sunset clause. To understand the continuity between NAFTA and USMCA despite the Trump administration’s radical negotiating objectives, this thesis then analyses the process of institutional change, drawing on over one hundred interviews. Historical institutionalism is integrated into the two-level game framework to understand the role of increasing returns and veto power in a trade renegotiation. Those two path dependence mechanisms were the main reason for US policy continuity as labour unions and members of Congress historically opposed to NAFTA defended the agreement against President Trump’s disruptive strategy, while business groups lobbied to preserve the status quo. In Mexico, path dependence also constrained Mexican President López Obrador to endorse USMCA, despite his long-standing criticism of NAFTA and efforts to regain policy space. He instead used USMCA to lock in his ambitious labour reforms, just as NAFTA was used in the 1990s to lock in trade liberalisation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".