Russell Roberts on CAFTA and jobs

By Alex Singleton | 6 August 2005

Russell Roberts (pictured), a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, writes on the Cafe Hayek blog:

the Economic Policy Institute has a new study that finds that NAFTA has resulted in 1 million lost jobs since 1993. There isn't a phrase to describe... this assessment. When you overstate something, it's sometimes a result of double-counting. This is half-counting - looking only at jobs that have been lost to displaced production and ignoring jobs created because of expanded opportunities due to producing goods more efficiently.

But even though this number is flawed, it's still remarkably unremarkable. NAFTA has been in effect for just over eleven and a half years. According to the absurdly assessment of the EPI, NAFTA has destroyed about 87,000 jobs a year. The US economy added more than twice that number in a single month and even that increase of 207,000 is a net number - an increase above and beyond job losses.