NAFTA Rebooted - some points

How do you stop the President from tearing up a trade deal. As per Bob Woodward in his new book Fear:Trump in White House, by simply pulling out the signing paper from the desk. The President simply forgot that he had to unsign the NAFTA deal, or rather sign a NAFTA withdrawal (someone please do that for RCEP in India). While the deal break never happened (or engineered to not happen), the revised onerous negotiations on NAFTA wound their way to give the world a glimpse of what makes the US President happy when it comes to trade deals. Mexico has hammered out a deal that's acceptable to the US President. And going by the look of it, Trump loves trophies. He got his wall sponsored. Well almost. Canadians are still thinking, and bargaining. 

One can understand the Canadian negotiators' dilemma. There's noting on the table for Canadians if they sign. But if they don't, they have things to lose in trade and economic growth. US is their biggest trade partner with more than 3/4th of Canadian exports headed to USA, thanks to NAFTA and friendly border compliance procedures. They also import more than half of all their import needs from US. Of particular interest is automobile trade that makes almost one fifth of the total trade between them. This would change if NAFTA changes. 

Automobiles are interesting in NAFTA. NAFTA changed the way auto majors operated in north American market. Auto components shuttle across NAFTA borders around 7 times on an average before coming out inside a car. Many carmakers shifted assembly bases to across border Mexico where wages were cheap, almost tenth of that in US. I had blogged earlier about the preposterousness of Trump's demand to have the cars assembled by workers who earn atleast 16 USD per hour (Mexican assembly workers earn around 2 USD per hour). I thought that's a deal breaker. I was wrong! Trump has pulled it off in the first round as Mexicans have agreed to the condition of more than 40% of final assembly to be done by workers earning 16 USD per hour, and for the condition that the share of USA in car components to increase from almost 60% currently to 75% after the reboot of NAFTA. If that jacks up the car price by a thousand dollars, so be it. It's an 'America first' world after all. 

It's not that Canada is not warming up. Their dairy sector is thinking of opening up for US imports after years of resistance from Quebec farmers; Canadian dairy sector has protectionist tariffs that would put India's dairy product tariffs to shame. The investments in Canada are already taking a hit due to uncertainty around NAFTA and due to the revised corporate tax rates in US.  At this time, Canadians seem to focusing too much on dispute resolution mechanism, the chapter 19 of the deal, that shouldn't bother so much during normals times; but given Trump's record at WTO dispute body Canadians are right to try and play safe here. Given the overall loss Canadians stand to suffer if the deal falls apart, it won't be a surprise if Canada decides to play ball after all.

There's time till September end to strike out a deal and make the rebooted NAFTA a union of original three. Otherwise, going Trump's way it would be a bilateral US-Mexico deal, on Trump's terms. Well almost.