For example, according to a 2014 Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) report, the United States is getting $127 billion a year from “additional” trade growth supported by NAFTA. For the United States, with its population of 320 million at the time of this study, the pure economic benefit was therefore only $400 per person, while GDP per capita was close to $50,000. And while nafta costs are heavily focused on certain sectors like auto manufacturing — where job losses can be significant for some companies — the benefits of the trade pact (such as lower prices for imported electronics or clothing) are widely distributed among the United States, as in the case of any trade pact around the world. Exports of real goods to Canada increased by 50% between 1993 and 2016 and imports of real goods increased by 41%. It appears that NAFTA has improved the U.S. trade position vis-à-vis Canada. In order to dispel fears that NAFTA, the first regional trade agreement between a developing country and two industrialised countries, would have a negative impact on the environment, the Commission was tasked with carrying out an ongoing ex-post environmental assessment[34]. It created one of the first ex-post frameworks for the environmental assessment of trade liberalization, which aimed to provide a certain amount of evidence regarding the initial assumptions about NAFTA and the environment. such as the fear that NAFTA will create a “race to the downside” in environmental regulation between the three countries or that NAFTA will put pressure on governments to strengthen their environmental protection. [35] The CEC organized four symposia to assess the environmental impact of NAFTA and commissioned 47 papers on the subject from leading independent experts. [36] A Canada-U.S.
free trade agreement was concluded in 1988 and NAFTA extended most of the provisions of that agreement to Mexico. . . .
