The NAFTA Preference and U.S.-Mexico Trade

This paper focuses on the U.S. tariff preference afforded to Mexico vis-à-vis non-NAFTA trading partners, and allows us to evaluate the impact of NAFTA in a manner consistent with the idea behind a preferential trading agreement. The estimation technique exploits the time-varying dimension of the tariff preference, over 1983 to 2001. We find that a higher tariff preference corresponds to increased U.S. import demand for goods, and that import demand was more responsive to changes in the tariff preference once NAFTA was in place than it was on average.