A rare win-win in America on trade front

TO DESCRIBE the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) signed by the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1994 as "historic" would be an overstatement.

Creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America and the world's largest trade area, the agreement eliminated or reduced barriers to the trade and investment between the three large economies of the US, Canada and Mexico. It was negotiated by Republican and Democratic administrations and signed by the centrist Democratic former president Bill Clinton, enjoying wide bipartisan and public support.

In a way, Nafta was celebrated at the time as a triumph of the emerging forces of globalisation that were sweeping the world during the 1990s in the post-Cold War era. The expansion of capitalism involved the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy that would end up benefiting everyone, an example of what economists and political scientists referred to as a "zero-sum game".