Free Trade Accord at 10: Growing Pains Are Clear:
"Leaders promised the accord would create millions of good jobs, curb illegal immigration and raise living standards 'from the Yukon to the Yucatan.' A decade later, the verdict, even among Nafta's strongest supporters, is that for those goals free trade by itself is not enough.

Nafta's effects cannot be isolated from the broader changes in a globalizing economy. But many economists and political analysts say that while the accord stimulated trade and overall growth, it also brought jarring dislocations. For better or worse — or both — Nafta transformed the continent's economic landscape with startling speed."

Gary Hufbauer, a senior analyst at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington research group that supports free trade, said the gains for the United States — lower priced consumer goods and increased corporate earnings — are large compared to the losses.

"However, the gains are so thinly spread across the country that people don't thank Nafta when they buy a mango or inexpensive auto parts," he said.

The pain, he said, is concentrated in places like the Midwest, where manufacturing jobs have been lost to Mexico and Canada, and now to China. "Nafta-related job loss and lower income may be small, but the echo is very large because of all the other jobs lost to globalization," he said. "Nafta is the symbol for all of that pain."

The debate over Nafta continues to shape the future of free trade, even as more nations line up for its presumed benefits, like the four Central American countries that reached their own accord with the United States last week.

But even that agreement is likely to face agonizing debate in Congress during an election year as Nafta's wrenching changes provide a rallying point for opponents who say it was too much too fast and paid too little attention to the impact on workers.

With the national consensus on free trade fraying and the loss of jobs looming as a campaign issue, it is doubtful whether any Democratic candidate or President Bush will stand unapologetically behind deeper trade liberalization in the coming year.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/27/international/americas/27NAFT.html?pagewanted=all&position=