NAFTA helped Texas border cities, Fed report says

[TexasTowelie]

El Paso and other cities on the Texas-Mexico border have benefited from the 22-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement despite losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economist concludes in a new report.

The report comes just weeks before Donald Trump will become the nation's 45th president with his campaign vow to withdraw the United States from the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada in hopes of getting lost manufacturing jobs to return to this country.

Enacted in 1994, NAFTA aimed to spur economic growth by phasing out numerous trade tariffs between the three nations. Many factories, mostly garment makers, moved out of El Paso and other border cities after the agreement and other trade changes took effect.

"Texas border cities have been largely able to adjust to trade, taking advantage of geographic location to exploit NAFTA-derived opportunities and growth in northern Mexico," wrote Jesus Cañas, business economist at the Dallas Fed, in an article in the bank's newly published "Southwest Economy" magazine.

Read more: http://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2017/01/03/el-paso-texas-mexico-trade-economy/96003432/

[HoneyBadger]

1. Does anyone own a significant amount of clothing that was made in Mexico?

I consider that fake news. The El Paso garment industry is not very large, nor was it ever the primary beneficiary of NAFTA. If you want to know how El Paso benefitted, many Mexican factories had ex pat white collar staff that lived on the US side and commuted. It brought jobs and taxes to the US border zone that would otherwise have existed elsewhere, possibly in another country. However the costs still had to work and if a factory could save 10% by moving to China, NAFTA did squat. I spent many years working in maquiladoras and commuting from El Paso to Juarez.