Looking back on NAFTAs promises and realities from a local perspective. The state of Coahuila, Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effectuation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, can be considered one of the most radical trade experiments in history, representing a new phase in global trade policy. Perhaps the most significant aspect of NAFTA was the fact that it was the first agreement of its kind between economies with fundamentally different levels of development. As a test case for other developing economies, developments in Mexico under NAFTA have been closely followed and evaluated by the international financial community. Almost celebrating its fifteenth anniversary, policymakers insist that Mexico has made progress in many areas. Indeed, Mexicos growth, in terms of exports and foreign investments, has been remarkable during the past one-and-a-half decade. Today, many other governments of developing countries consider export-oriented industrialisation, driven by foreign investments, to be the most viable recipe for capturing the potential benefits of globalisation and a fast-track out of poverty. Nevertheless, the realities of free trade policies are often far more complex than their promises suggest. Not all regions, economic sectors, and social groups manage to become successfully integrated into the world economy. In order to understand why some regions perform better than others, detailed case studies are necessary. The success or failure of any development strategy generally involves a great number of variables such as local industrial traditions, local governance structures and the roles of the local private sector. The state of Coahuila, situated directly on the US border, makes an interesting case study with respect to the socio-economic impact of NAFTA. During the past decade, a large number of domestic and foreign companies, in particular in the automotive and garment sectors, have made substantial investments in Coahuila, strongly contributing to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and growth of exports. However, when looking beyond these impressive macro-economic figures, it becomes clear that the gains have not been evenly divided across the different sub-regions of Coahuila. Questions must also be raised about their ability to contribute to sustained, longterm growth. Only few foreign direct investments are firmly embedded within the local economy, which as a result has become extremely vulnerable to external shocks.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".