THE IMPACT OF NAFTA ON THE GROWTH OF NORTH AMERICAN BILATERAL TRADE

This paper examines data from the International Monetary Fund's International Financial Statistics database to see how bilateral trade patterns between Canada. Mexico. and the United States changed as a consequence of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian trade, annual export and import data were converted percentages of total trade. A pooled variance means lest was then used to see if there was a significant difference between the growth of trade in the pre- and post-NAFTA periods. In addition, the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxin test w as also performed on each of the trade periods Both tests show that the main of the NAFTA was an increased rate of growth of bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. There was additional evidence for an increased growth rate of U.S. exports to Canada, but the results for increased U.S. imports from Canada Here mixed. There was no evidence to indicate that Mexican-Canadian trade growth rates changed as a result of the agreement.