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Much attention has been given to the impact that free trade agreements have had on member countries. There has been relatively little attention given to the impact on nonmembers, especially as it relates to both trade and FDI. This paper uses a gravity model framework to estimate the impact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had on U.S. trade and FDI relationships with both member and nonmember countries. The estimated impacts are refined to account for each country's level of development. The results confirm many previous studies on the ability of the standard gravity model to explain trade and FDI patterns. This study goes further and establishes that there are additional impacts related to both membership in the NAFTA and levels of development.

Regional trade agreements have become increasingly common in recent years. They have been hailed by some as contributing to the liberalization process by going further and faster than treaties involving many countries, while others insist that they are not only inherently discriminatory but they limit the expansion of more generalized treaties. One of the important questions is how such regional agreements impact those countries outside the treaty. This is usually studied in terms of how far the preferential reduction of barriers to the partners creates or diverts trade with respect to third parties. One reason to study third-party effects is that they have received far less attention than do the often very detailed studies for those in the treaty. A second reason is to consider the effects on FDI, as most studies focus on trade effects. A third reason is the interest in the ways in which increased regionalisation affects different kinds of countries. More particularly, have the regional treaties had a differential impact on outside countries with varying levels of per capita GDP and, hence, affected the convergence of such levels? This paper reviews the theory of third-party effects, as well as some existing empirical studies. It then focuses on how U.S. trade and outward FDI patterns with third parties were impacted as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The test is made within a gravity model framework for trade and FDI, which takes into account the effects of GDP, GDP per capita, geographic and cultural distance, transport costs, and exchange rates. Regional dummies are also considered. Special attention is given to the NAFTA and how it has affected U.S. trade and FDI patterns. In addition to a NAFTA dummy to capture the direct effects, interactive terms are used to capture to what extent these impacts accrued to countries within North America as opposed to globally and also how the impacts relate to a country's level of development. The results indicate clearly that most of the trade benefits have accrued to insiders and that the gains to outsiders are positively related to that country's level of development. Furthermore, the NAFTA has resulted in reduced outward FDI from the United States, with this effect being much stronger within North America. The results also indicate, for countries outside the NAFTA area, that the extent to which NAFTA increased U.S. outward FDI is a decreasing function of each nonmembers levels of development. That is, the most developed countries outside of NAFTA benefited least from the NAFTA vis-à-vis FDI. The format of this paper is as follows. Section 2 provides a brief literature review. Section 3 describes U.S. trade and FDI relations with a sample of 52 countries. Section 4 presents the model used, and Section 5 the empirical estimates. Section 6 concludes and discusses policy implications.

This paper has measured the impact of the NAFTA on U.S. trade and FDI patterns with each of 52 countries over the period 1970 to 2000. It confirms the ability of the gravity variables (GDP, GDP per capita, distance, language, and the exchange rate) to explain trade and FDI patterns well. Furthermore, regional dummies also indicate to what extent trade between the United States and several regions are unexplained by the model. The results indicate that the United States trades too much with Japan and East Asia, but too little with Europe and Latin America. In addition, it is shown that trade and FDI are complementary; that is, U.S. FDI to a country results in increased trade with that same country. The analysis is then extended to measure the impact the NAFTA has had on the U.S. trade and FDI relations. This study has gone further than most others by measuring the extent to which these gains are spread globally as opposed to simply captured within North America. More fundamentally, the study links these impacts, for both members and nonmembers of the NAFTA, to each country's level of development. The results indicate that the significant trade gains of the NAFTA have been internal to the NAFTA and have accrued to Mexico. For nonmembers, the trade gains with the United States as a result of the NAFTA are positively related to a country's level of development. The important result for U.S. FDI is that the NAFTA reduced it strongly for members and marginally for nonmembers. The more developed nonmembers received less FDI as a result of the NAFTA than did less developed countries. This paper has dealt with the economic issues narrowly conceived to reflect both trade and FDI effects on income and their distribution inside and outside the NAFTA by levels of development. There are other “economic variables”—Canada appears to have been particularly interested in avoiding the side effects of protection in its dominant foreign market (e.g., Hart, 1994) and a range of more explicit political issues. In addition, much depends on the precise parameters of any agreement on such matters as the speed and extent of tariff change, rules of origin, sectoral exemptions, and the degree of harmonization of policies on FDI and other policies. That being said, the implications of this study for a policy such as a Free Trade of the America's are that the trade gains are likely to be internal and focused on the lower-income members. FDI internally will be more focused on higher-income countries. It is worth pointing out also that the results may also be relevant for the European experience. As reported in Krueger (1999), Italy's income per capita in the 1950s relative to the richer countries in the original European common market was about the same as between the United States and Mexico during the early 1990s. Krueger goes on to point out that, when Spain and Portugal acceded in the mid-1980s, their per capita incomes relative to incomes in the richest EU countries were not significantly greater than the Mexican relative to the United States at the inception of the NAFTA. In other words, the NAFTA should not be considered the first example of a free trade agreement between developed and developing countries. The results here are therefore likely applicable to Europe, as well as may be relevant for any future FTAA.