From NAFTA to USMCA: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Forces Producing North America's Regional Trade Agreements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 1, 2018, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), concluding 13 months of negotiations that concerned economies totaling 27.88% of world GDP. The recentness, magnitude, and relevance of the USMCA invokes a comprehensive analysis of the multidimensional factors that led to this agreement. Explaining the USMCA of 2018 requires insight of the continent’s political and economic forces that bound Canada, the United States, and Mexico with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994. After doing so, this study then compiles a variety of works in a meta-analysis on NAFTA’s effects during the past 25 years. This paper finds that NAFTA achieved its intended goals, but failed to anticipate many negative repercussions for which it is criticized today. Then, this study investigates the demand for renegotiation of NAFTA which was triggered by Donald Trump calling it “the worst trade deal in history maybe ever” during his presidential campaign. However, when presenting the new USMCA to the press, he described it as a “wonderful new trade deal.” Therefore, study analyzes how different the USMCA is from NAFTA, and finds that the few changes are explained by a modernization of certain chapters to adapt the treaty to the digital era. These modifications heavily resonate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional free trade agreement that included the U.S. until President Trump withdrew from it. What then results to be a rebranding of other agreements is predicted here to bring more political repercussions than economic change, as elections in Canada dawn later this year and in the U.S. in 2020. Ultimately, each party succeeded per its own renegotiation objectives; Mexico and Canada sought market penetration in the U.S., whereas the U.S. sought concessions and an end to NAFTA. Ratification of the USMCA is pending at the domestic level of each country, which this paper predicts will occur successfully, perhaps even before the end of 2019. Nonetheless, despite the modernization efforts involved in producing the USMCA, this paper questions whether the agreement equips these three member states to face the challenges of tomorrow.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".