The Economics and Politics of Revoking NAFTA / Raphael Auer, Barthélémy Bonadio, Andrei A. Levchenko.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Auer, Raphael.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bonadio, Barthélémy.

Levchenko, Andrei A.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25379.

NBER working paper series no. w25379

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

We provide a quantitative assessment of both the aggregate and the distributional effects of revoking NAFTA using a multi-country, multi-sector, multi-factor model of world production and trade with global input-output linkages. Revoking NAFTA would reduce US welfare by about 0.2%, and Canadian and Mexican welfare by about 2%. The distributional impacts of revoking NAFTA across workers in different sectors are an order of magnitude larger in all three countries, ranging from -2.7 to 2.26% in the United States. We combine the quantitative results with information on the geographic distribution of sectoral employment, and compute average real wage changes in each US congressional district, Mexican state, and Canadian province. We then examine the political correlates of the economic effects. Congressional district-level real wage changes are negatively correlated with the Trump vote share in 2016: districts that voted more for Trump would on average experience greater real wage reductions if NAFTA is revoked.

Notes:

Print version record

December 2018.