“The Pros and Cons of Pursuing Free-Trade Agreements”. The Congressional Budget Office. July 31, 2003 – “The effects of the FTAs on the economies of the partner countries are likely to be much larger, however, because those countries have much smaller economies than the United States does. The NAFTA-induced increase in U.S. exports to Mexico by 2001 indicated by the CBO model, although trivial in comparison to the U.S. economy, equaled 1.9 percent of Mexican GDP. Likewise, the NAFTA-induced increase in U.S. imports from Mexico by that year equaled 1.7 percent of Mexican GDP. The disparity in size between the U.S. economy and the economies of many of the countries for which free-trade agreements have been proposed is even larger than that between the U.S. and Mexican economies. Thus, the benefits to those economies relative to the benefits to the U.S. economy are likely to be even larger than was the case for Mexico with NAFTA. Moreover, the economies of many small developing countries are less diversified than the U.S. economy, producing one or two main products for export. An agreement allowing those products into the United States would be of tremendous benefit to such a country’s economy.”
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