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Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Globalization and Trade

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

An Honest Look at Mexican Economic Growth in the NAFTA Era

CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot examines how the Mexican economy has fared under 20 years of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in a new column in The Guardian. The answer is summed up well in Mark’s original title, “Twenty Years Since NAFTA: Mexico Could Have Done Worse, But It’s Not Clear How.”

Mark writes:

Well if we look at the past 20 years, it’s not a pretty picture. The most basic measure of economic progress, especially for a developing country like Mexico, is the growth of income (or GDP) per person. Out of 20 Latin American countries (South and Central America plus Mexico), Mexico ranks 18, with growth of less than 1 percent annually since 1994. It is of course possible to argue that Mexico would have done even worse without NAFTA, but then the question would be, why?

From 1960-1980 Mexico’s GDP per capita nearly doubled. This amounted to huge increases in living standards for the vast majority of Mexicans. If the country had continued to grow at this rate, it would have European living standards today. And there was no natural barrier to this kind of growth: this is what happened in South Korea, for example. But Mexico, like the rest of the region, began a long period of neoliberal policy changes that …put an end to the prior period of growth and development. The region as a whole grew just 6 percent per capita from 1980-2000; and Mexico grew by 16 percent – a far cry from the 99 percent of the previous 20 years.

He also notes that – unsurprisingly considering how little growth there has been, that “Mexico’s national poverty rate was 52.3 percent in 2012, basically the same as it was in 1994 (52.4 percent).”

CEPR / January 07, 2014

Article Artículo

Workers

Is Paid Sick Leave Good for Business?

Connecticut made history in 2011 as the first state to require employers to provide paid sick leave to all full-time and part-time employees.  The law, which took effect on January 1, 2012, applies to around 400,000 Connecticut workers in businesses in service industries with fifty or more employees and allows these employees to earn 5 paid sick days a year.

CEPR and Teresa Kroeger / January 06, 2014