Audio: The Unending Campaign against NAFTA

Many Mexicans and Americans display vague misgivings about the North American Free Trade Agreement; their comments indicate that this is largely because the agreement did not turn out to be a development panacea.The core of Mexico´s growth problem, in my view, is political—namely, the inability to deal with structural problems affecting taxes, energy, education, labor markets, monopolies, and self-acting cushions against economic downturns. These failures left the country with little more than trade policy under NAFTA to generate economic growth, and trade policy cannot do the whole job.