تجزیه و تحلیل اقتصادسنجی از انحراف تجارت تحت پیمان نفتا

We provide an econometric analysis of whether or not the tariff preferences extended to Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) may have resulted in trade diversion. A review of previous studies, both descriptive and econometric, suggests that trade diversion has occurred especially as evidenced by Mexico’s increased shares of US imports apparently at the expense of several Asian countries. We use a conceptual framework based on a partial-equilibrium model of differentiated product industries under monopolistic competition for many countries. The model is implemented empirically using a fixed-effect panel analysis of US imports at the Harmonized System (HS) 2-digit level for the period, 1992–1998. Of the 70 sets of regressions that were run, the coefficients of the tariff rates were statistically significant in 15 cases. The strongest evidence of trade diversion was found mainly for US imports of textile and apparel products. We also estimated regressions for selected commodities at the HS 4-digit level. The results suggest trade diversion for textiles, apparel, and some footwear products but not for trade in motor cars and vehicles and television receivers, which may have been more influenced by changes in foreign direct investment and outsourcing rather than tariff preferences.

Prior to and since the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in January 1994, there has been a great deal of interest in policy and academic circles in the impact that NAFTA might have on the trade and economic welfare of members—Canada, Mexico, and the United States—and non-members. In this paper, we investigate the effects of NAFTA on trade diversion at a highly disaggregated level of commodity detail. The rationale for this approach is that the creation of a preferential trading arrangement like NAFTA involves the interplay of the removal of the differential structure of tariffs between member countries and the maintenance of these national tariffs with respect to non-members. In addition, we know that rules-of-origin (ROO) were designed to provide special preferences for selected sectors in the NAFTA to the possible detriment of non-members. We begin in Section 2 with a brief review of the complexities of distinguishing the effects of NAFTA from the myriad of other forces at work before and following the inception of NAFTA. We also discuss the approaches and conclusions of some pertinent studies of the effects of NAFTA. In Section 3, we discuss the conceptual framework that provides the basis for our analysis and, in Section 4, we implement our econometric investigation. Our empirical results are reported in Section 5. Conclusions and implications for further research are presented in Section 6.

In this paper, we have developed and implemented a framework for analyzing how tariff preferences in the NAFTA may affect US imports from Canada and Mexico. Based on trade and tariff information at the 2- and 4-digit levels of the HS, our econometric analysis has suggested that NAFTA has resulted in trade diversion especially in US imports of textiles and apparel products from Mexico. Evidence based on other studies suggests that these imports have come at the expense especially of Asian suppliers. Our research and some of the other studies that we have noted demonstrate the importance of commodity disaggregation in analyzing the effects of preferential trading arrangements as well as the need to consider how foreign direct investment and outsourcing may have interacted with tariff preferences in influencing patterns of trade and specialization in the NAFTA and non-NAFTA countries.