The North American Free Trade Agreement was signed between the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1992 and was put in effect in the year 1994. The objective of NAFTA was to remove the barriers to trade restrictions and tariff and have a successful open monetary market between these countries (as compared to the European Economic Countries since they went into effect in 1994)(Floyd). Anna Swanson and Kevin Granville, in a New York Times article, detail that before NAFTA, the average tariffs were of 7.1% for Mexico, 3.5% for the United States, and 4.2% for Canada; under NAFTA’s these trade tariffs were reduced to 0%(Swanson & Granville).
According to Sraders, NAFTA has improved the economy of the United States, Mexico, and Canada by increasing the overall trade to over $1 trillion (Sraders). NAFTA came into effect in 1994, mainly with the purpose to remove the barriers of trade restrictions and tariff and have a successful open monetary market (mainly focusing in agriculture, textile and automobile industry) between these countries Also, there seems to be a decrease in manufacturing workers from 17 million in 1994 to 12.4 million in 2017 - claiming those jobs were sent to Mexico - lower cost of employment (Amadeo).
In this project, we would like to focus on the economic impacts of the NAFTA treaty.
. To what extent did NAFTA improve the economies of Mexico, Canada, and United States?
. Is there a correlation between the progress of the economies and the enactment of the NAFTA treaty?
Possible outcomes:
. To determine the value for each of three nations according to the economic indicators
Our data will come from the Data world bank; the “wbstats” package will be used to download the data for each indicator through R without having to do manual downloads of CSV files.
The world bank data bank is a free open source that offers a rich collection of global development data for numerous economic indicators. This resource allows users to select and slice the datasets by either specific country, economic indicator, or topic for a desired time frame (World Bank).
The “wbstats” package was created with the purpose of helping researchers download the data from the Databank indicator into R. This package allows us to establish a ‘live’ connection, thus, enabling us to search and download data from any indicator available as our analyses takes form in a reproducible manner (Pitburn).
We will use ggplot, ggrepel, dplyr, expss to manipulate, organize, and visualize our data. The following some of the few techniques that are proven to be effective at EDA that we believe will help us achieve our objective:
Graphical=c("Distribution Plot", "Box plot", "Histograms","Scatterplot", " Residual Plot")
Quanittative=c("Statistical summary: mean, quantiles, sum, count","Two Sample t-Test for Equal Means, ANOVA", "
Bartlett's Test,Chi-Square Test,F-Test", "Distributional Measures: Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test", "Regression Analysis")
EDATechniques=data.frame(Graphical,Quanittative)
EDATechniques## Graphical
## 1 Distribution Plot
## 2 Box plot
## 3 Histograms
## 4 Scatterplot
## 5 Residual Plot
## Quanittative
## 1 Statistical summary: mean, quantiles, sum, count
## 2 Two Sample t-Test for Equal Means, ANOVA
## 3 \nBartlett's Test,Chi-Square Test,F-Test
## 4 Distributional Measures: Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test
## 5 Regression AnalysisAbout us. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://data.worldbank.org/about
Amadeo, K. (2018, November 11). 6 Negative Effects of NAFTA. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://www.thebalance.com/disadvantages-of-nafta-3306273
Floyd, D. (2018, December 05). NAFTA’s Winners and Losers. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/north-american-free-trade-agreement.asp
Piburn, J. (2018, January 03). Introduction to the wbstats R-package. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wbstats/vignettes/Using_the_wbstats_package.html
Sraders, A. (2018, July 18). What Is NAFTA? History, Purpose and Accomplishments. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://www.thestreet.com/politics/nafta-north-american-free-trade-agreement-14651970
Swanson, A., & Granville, K. (2017, October 12). What Would Happen if the U.S. Withdrew From Nafta. Retrieved December 10, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/business/economy/what-would-happen-if-the-us-withdrew-from-nafta.html