They’re at it again: Selling the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement

The headlines once again misrepresent the aims and consequences of a US free trade agreement, in this case repeating the International Trade Commission’s claim that President Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) will boost US growth and employment.

The International Trade Commission is required by law to evaluate the economic consequences of the USMCA, which is supposed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), before Congress can debate whether to approve it.  According to its report, which was released on April 18, 2019, the agreement can be expected to “raise U.S. real GDP by $68.2 billion (0.35 percent) and U.S. employment by 176,000 jobs (0.12 percent)” and “would likely have a positive impact on U.S. trade, both with USMCA partners and with the rest of the world.”

While supporters of the agreement happily repeat the Committee’s conclusion “that, if fully implemented and enforced, USMCA would have a positive impact on U.S. real GDP and employment,” the fact is that the predicted gains are miniscule.  Moreover, given the flaws in the Commission’s admittedly sophisticated modeling, there is no reason to take the results seriously.  Finally, a careful examination of the many chapters in the proposed agreement makes clear that its real aim is to strengthen contemporary globalization dynamics, enhancing corporate power and profits at the expense of majority living and working conditions in all three countries.

Putting the projected “gains” in perspective

The Commission assumed that the US economy’s complete adjustment to the agreement would take six years.  It then used a computable general equilibrium model to simulate how the terms of the agreement would change US markets and compared the “equilibrium” outcome at the end of the adjustment period with baseline results that assumed no significant change in US economic policies or global agreements over the same period.

On the basis of such modeling, the Commission concluded that six years after the implementation of the agreement, the US economy would be $68.2 billion bigger than if the agreement had not been approved.  That is, as the Commission acknowledges, a one-time gain of 35/100 of one percent in real GDP.  Current US GDP is over $21 trillion; $68 billion is a rounding error in an economy of that size.

As for the projected growth in employment, the one-time gain of 176,000 jobs relative to the base line forecast translates into an increase in employment after six years of 12/100 of one percent.  That gain in employment is roughly equal to the number of new jobs added in a month of moderate economic growth.  The Commission’s model produced similar miniscule gains for other variables, including US wages.

In short, if we take these predictions seriously, the obvious conclusion is that there is little to gain from approving this agreement.  Of course, that is not the Commission’s position.  However, there is little reason to take these results seriously.

Dodgy methodology

It took a lot for the Commission to produce even these minimal games.  More specifically, it took a dodgy methodology that is biased towards policies that promote globalization.

The Commission organized its work as follows: it first sought to model the economic consequences of “eight groups of USMCA provisions: agriculture, automobiles, intellectual property rights (IPRs), e-commerce, labor, international data transfer, cross-border services, and investment.” Then, it took the provision specific results of each group and used them as modeling inputs for the economy-wide computable general equilibrium model it used to produce the overall estimates cited above.

Since not all the provisions changed current policies, the Commission divided the eight groups into two categories.  The first included the “set of provisions that would alter current policies or set new standards within the three member countries, and that would therefore be expected to modify current conditions after USMCA enters into effect.” This included provisions affecting agriculture, automobiles, IPRs, e-commerce, labor, and investment decisions related to the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.

The second category included provisions that “would reduce policy uncertainty. These commitments would primarily serve to deter future trade and investment barriers, thus offering firms some assurance that current regulations and standards, which may or may not be expressly governed by current policies, will not become more restrictive.” Included in this category are provisions that would affect international data transfer, cross-border services trade, and investment decisions related to market access and nonconforming measures.

Significantly, it was the Commission’s determination of the gains from those provisions that would reduce policy uncertainty, by restricting the possibility for future government regulation of corporate activity, that proved decisive.  As a Public Citizen Eyes on Trade blog post pointed out,

Most of the [overall gains reported by the Commission] are derived from a highly dubious new research methodology, which assigns an invented positive economic value to terms that reduce “policy uncertainty” by freezing in place environmental, consumer protection, financial and other safeguards. If the ITC had not done this, the report would have projected a negative outcome. All $68.2 billion of the deal’s supposed economic gains arise from simulating the impact of removing trade barriers that do not exist. In other words, the gains are generated not through the removal of trade barriers directly, but through the elimination of the possibility of new future regulatory policies, which are deemed to be potential trade barriers. Absent this fabrication, the revised NAFTA would have been projected to lower the United States’ GDP by $22.6 billion and reduce the number of jobs by 53,900.

The problems only multiply when these separate results are used as inputs in the Commission’s economy-wide model.  This model, as noted above, is a computable general equilibrium model.  As such, it seeks to process all the ways the changes generated by the agreement interact to change market behavior before eventually producing – over a six-year period in this case — a new equilibrium outcome for the economy.  As one might imagine, this kind of modeling is quite complex and to ensure a result it requires some very significant assumptions.  Among them are:

• The assumption that product markets are “perfectly competitive (implying zero economic profit for the firm).”
• The assumption that there is “full capacity utilization of capital.”
• The assumption that there is no unemployment.
• The assumption that “global trade balances remain constant.”

In other words, while we may want the Commission to investigate whether a new trade agreement might cause a worsening of trade balances, or unemployment, or deindustrialization, or monopolization, the Commission’s model, by assumption, asserts that these are non-problems.  As a result, the model has a clear pro-trade agreement bias.

Thanks to these assumptions, if a country drops its trade restrictions, market forces will quickly and effortlessly lead capital and labor to shift into new, more productive uses.  It is no wonder that mainstream economic studies, which rely on computable general equilibrium modeling, always produce results supporting ratification of free trade agreements.  In light of this, it is striking how small the estimated gains were for this trade agreement.

The real winners

So, one might ask, what is really going on here?  Well, the agreement enjoys strong corporate support precisely because a number of its chapters include provisions responsive to the interests of leading US multinational corporations.  What follows are just a few examples drawn from the report.

The agreement includes provisions that require harmonization and thus a reduction in food safety standards, force governments to negotiate new standards with industry representatives, set deadlines for import checks, require that new standards be based on scientific principles, and that safety standards be applied “only to the extent necessary to achieve the appropriate level of protection” and “not [be] more trade restrictive than required.”

The agreement also includes a number of market access provisions to promote cross-border trade in services and financial services.  More specifically, the agreement’s market access provisions “are aimed at removing quotas and other barriers that impede the entry of services suppliers into foreign markets.” The Commission believes that “the broadcasting, telecommunications, and courier services sectors in the United States are estimated to gain the most, followed by the commercial banking sector in all three countries.”

The agreement also includes provisions “which would strengthen protections in major IPR categories such as trade secrets, regulatory data protection, patents, trademarks, copyrights, and civil, criminal, and administrative enforcement.”  The pharmaceutical industry will be one of the biggest beneficiaries.  For example, the agreement includes a “patent resolution mechanism that requires notice to patent holders, and an opportunity for relief, when a generic manufacturer seeks to rely on an originator’s test data for marketing approval without the patent holder’s consent.”

The USMCA would be the first U.S. free trade agreement with a chapter on digital trade.  Among other things, it would prevent governments “from restricting cross-border flows of financial data, which would require data to be stored or processed locally” and would “forbid them to adopt restrictive data measures in the future.”  This provision would be especially valuable to U.S. computer services and digital platform services firms. “Other key Digital Trade chapter provisions include a ban on import duties or other discriminatory customs measures on digital products (e.g., e-books, videos, music, software, and games), and prohibition of legal discrimination against digital products produced or created in other signatory countries.”

The agreement also includes a chapter that restricts the ability of governments to use state-owned enterprises to meet public needs by requiring that they be “regulated impartially, and do not benefit from special treatment and unfairly infringe upon the activities of private firms.”

The list goes on.  No wonder that major business associations are expressing strong support for the agreement. As the New York Times reports:

Industry groups called for the pact’s quick passage into law. Linda Dempsey, the vice president for international economic affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers, said that the deal was “a win for manufacturers.”

Jordan Haas, the director of trade policy at the Internet Association, said the report underlined that the deal’s digital trade provisions were “critical to America’s future economic success” and “mean jobs and opportunities in every state.”

There is a lot at stake in this struggle.  We need to stop calling for progressive reform of the agreement, a call that only leads to popular confusion about what drives US government policy.  Instead we need to build a movement that simply says no to NAFTA in any form.

The Uneasy US-China Relationship: What Lies Ahead?

The US and China are the two dominant poles in the global economy, as illustrated in the figure below which traces the global trade in parts and components. And they have a very uneasy relationship.  However, despite current tensions, it is unlikely that either side will succeed in dramatically changing it.  The main reason is that the relationship has been heavily shaped by the activities of leading multinational corporations, including from the US, and their interests in maintaining it can be expected to set limits on the actions of both governments.

China-US tensions

Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China and head of the Communist Party of China, is actively pursuing policies that he hopes will reduce the country’s dependence on foreign multinational corporations and western markets.  Toward that end, he has promoted an industrial modernization program called “Made in China 2025” which aims to make the country a global power in 10 strategic industries, signed new trade agreements, created new regional institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launched new global initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthened the country’s military.  This effort is often described in the western media as an attempt at decoupling from the west.

The US government for its part sees these efforts as a challenge to US dominance and has taken steps to block them and to isolate China.  For example, the US has levied tariffs on Chinese exports to the US, and has demanded that China do more to respect US intellectual property rights and open up more domestic markets to US firms.  It has also sought to stop other countries from using Chinese technology, especially in their wireless networks, and from participating in Chinese organized regional organizations and initiatives.  It also seeks to include a so-called “poison pill” clause in the US–Mexico–Canada free trade agreement which would limit the ability of Canada and Mexico to sign trade agreements with China without US approval.  The US hopes to insert such a clause in other trade agreements in order to force countries to choose whether to have closer economic ties with the United States or with China. It has also greatly expanded its military activities in areas surrounding China, for example, in Vietnam and the Philippines.

While the differences between the two governments are serious, and represent conflicting elite interests, there are other important factors that need to be considered in evaluating likely future developments.  One of the most important is the profit considerations of multinational corporations.

The continuing importance of multinational corporations in China

Foreign direct investment has played a key role in boosting Chinese growth and creating a regional production system in which East Asian and Southeast Asian countries sell parts and components to China-based firms for final assembly and export outside the region, especially to the US and Europe.  As an Asian Development Bank study explains:

The pattern of inward FDI to Asia reveals firms’ motivation of entry that is different from that into the rest of the world. . . . Foreign affiliates in Asia established by FDI tend to be engaged more in trade and investment for the purpose of reexporting intermediate and/or final goods to the countries outside the host country (vertical and export-platform FDI) than those in other regions.

Rapid expansion of FDI to EEA [emerging East Asia] has been closely associated with the establishment of regional production networks by multinational companies, especially with the PRC as the region’s main assembly and production hub to create positive spillovers on the rest of the regional economies. Indeed, based on the number of foreign affiliates in Asia that both import and export, the PRC is the most popular host for vertical and export-platform FDI with various parent economies [as shown in the table below].

This positioning by foreign firms in China, as both importers and exporters, means that China, and emerging East Asia more broadly, remain tied to the global economy, and in particular the US economy.  The continuing strength of this relationship is highlighted in the following figure from the Asian Development Bank study.  The high correlation of 0.85 between the growth in US non-oil imports and the growth in exports by emerging East Asia (which includes the PRC) in the period after the Global Financial Crisis, makes clear that there has been relatively little decoupling since the crisis.

In addition, foreign multinational corporations continue to produce China’s most technologically advanced products and exports.  Chip making is a good example of the former.  Historically, the semiconductor industry has concentrated on producing relatively standard computer chips that could be used for multiple purposes.  However, increasingly the electronics industry is demanding new, more powerful and specialized computer chips for use in devices involving artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and the many products tied to the “internet of things.”

China continues to import most of its chips, but as a Stratfor article notes, foreign firms dominate semiconductor manufacturing in China as well, and especially of the most advanced chips:

the biggest players are often international companies with domestic subsidies. South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung are the two largest by revenue, followed closely by the United States’ Intel and Taiwan’s TSMC. But the two Chinese companies in the top six — Huahong Group and SMIC — are generations behind leading non-Chinese companies. And while Chinese tech giant Huawei has become a major player in designing certain chips, those powering the company’s latest generation of high-end smartphones were, in fact, built by TSMC.

As for exports, Sean Kenji Starrs, writing in the Socialist Register 2019, provides the following table listing the top ten exporters from China.  As we can see, electronics are China’s most important export product.  However:

The overwhelming majority of China’s top electronic exporters are foreign firms (especially Taiwanese and South Koreans – only Huawei makes the top ten) Samsung and LG perform their own final assembly in China but Western TNCs (including increasingly Japanese) prefer to outsource their lower value production to Taiwanese firms operating in China.

In short, it will be very challenging for the Chinese government to dramatically end its reliance on foreign multinational corporations or restructure its trade relations, without seriously jeopardizing Chinese growth (which is already falling fast) and the country’s political stability.

US multinational corporations and China

It is well-known that many leading US multinational corporations, including firms like Apple, Nike, and Walmart, depend on China-based production for their US sales.  What is less well-known is that many US multinational corporations occupy highly profitable positions in Chinese domestic markets.  For example, 2017 marked the sixth consecutive year that China was the top market for General Motors in terms of both sales and profit. Starr lists several other important examples: Google has a Chinese market share in smartphone operating systems of over 70 percent. Microsoft has a 90 percent market share in desktop operating systems. Boeing has a 45 percent market share in airplanes.  Coca-cola has a 63 percent market share in carbonated soft drinks. Starbucks has a 55 percent market share in coffeeshops. Cisco has a 55 percent market share in ethernet switches.

Moreover, as the economist Prema-chandra Athukorala shows in the table below, US multinationals operating in China, also use the country as a profitable platform from which to export to other countries.  In fact, in 2013, “the value of goods exported to the rest of the world by US MNE affiliates in China was US$37.5 billion, which was almost three times the value of their exports to the United States.”

Thus, China is extremely important to the operation and profitability of leading US firms.  And any US administration would have to think very carefully about the economic and political repercussions if it were to pursue policies that triggered a serious disruption in existing economic relations with China.

In sum, it is clear that both governments operate subject to real limits set by powerful multinational corporations, limits that will likely constrain China’s push for decoupling as well as the US drive to isolate China.  That said, it is important to keep in mind that there is an even more powerful force that could undermine the stability of the relationship and the contemporary global economy: the growing contradictions at work in both countries that have led to massive inequality and workplace resistance, ever slower growth and financial imbalances, and the likelihood of recession in the United States.