Trump's New Trade Deal: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Inu Manak, Simon Lester

Politics, Americas

There's a lot of all three in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Yesterday's biggest trade news was that the House Democratic leadership reached a deal with the Trump administration on changes to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States last year. The agreement was an effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Reception of the new deal was mixed, and after taking leadership of the House in January of this year, Democrats wanted to leave their own imprint on the new trade agreement.

In light of yesterday’s announcement and today’s release of the Protocol of Amendment by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, we repeat our analysis from October 2018 in this blog post, with updates to take into account the recent changes. This is by no means a comprehensive analysis, since there is a lot in the 2000-page document that makes up the USMCA, as modern trade agreements go well beyond traditional trade issues. Some of what is in there is good and some of it is bad (with many of the non-trade issues, there is likely to be disagreement as to which provision falls into which category).

In this blog post, we offer our thoughts on some of the key provisions, after which we provide an initial overall assessment of the agreement. For each item, we indicate in a parenthetical whether there have been changes from the USMCA signed last year to the amendments released today. We break it down into the good, the interesting, the whatever, the worrying, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good: