Fifteen years of NAFTA

A new working paper by Ciro Murayama reviews Mexico´s economic performance since the approval of NAFTA (fifteen years ago already!). The document does not reveal anything that we didn´t know, but it highlights once again the importance of active policies to overcome the weakness of the Mexican model.

The paper is in Spanish, but here it is part of the summary in English:

"The explanation of those poor results rests on the fact that Mexican economic
policy just went looking for to the goal of trade’s liberalization without take care
of the industrial or agricultural public policies to impulse the domestic
production. In addition, public investment in Mexico suffered a hard reduction
that means that Mexican governments misplaced the mission of the state to
impulse the development. Mexican policymakers fail out when they trusted that
free trade is enough and sufficient condition to be successful in develop an
economy."