موافقت نامه های تجاری و اقدام مشترک بین المللی: مورد پیمان نفتا (قرارداد تجارت آزاد آمریکای شمالی)

Business cycles correlation between Mexico and the US changed from being on a downward sloping path before 1992 to an upward sloping path after that. This paper suggests that the North American Free Trade Agreement could be the explanation. NAFTA generated not only an increase in the volume of trade but also a change in the elasticity of substitution between imports and exports. The paper tests this hypothesis using the neoclassical business cycles model. Although there are still some discrepancies between the theory and data in the degree of correlation, the direction of change in the model corresponds to the one in the data.

In this paper I focus on three things. First, I present empirical evidence that the correlations between the business cycles fluctuations of Mexico and the US had a sudden change in 1992: they have been on a downward sloping path until 1992, then they started to increase. Second, I interpret this change as an anticipated effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement and I search for the channels through which the trade agreement could affect comovements. Third, I test the proposed explanation using the neoclassical business cycles model. The fast evolution of world globalization generated an increasing interest of the economic literature for studying the effects of this process on the main macroeconomic variables. In particular, a large branch of literature studies the correlation between trade intensity and GDP comovements of the countries involved. On the one hand, there are many studies in the literature which show that, in cross-sectional analysis, more trade is associated to more correlated GDP business cycles of the countries involved (see Frankel and Rose, 1998; Anderson et al., 1999; Imbs, 2004; Kose and Yi, 2006). Most of these studies are done for industrialized countries, including, in particular, the US economy. On the other hand, Heathcote and Perri (2003), taking into account the time dimension, showed that US became less correlated with the rest of the word