The economic legacy of NAFTA: Another neoliberal zombie institution?

Abstract

NAFTA is an evolving neoliberal project of profound depth.  It remains alive despite the fact that its postulates and assumptions have been repeatedly disproven by empirical evidence and through logical analysis. Critiques of the project have accumulated since 1994, but without effect. The ideas of neoliberal political economy have been demonstrated to be lifeless, yet they continue to dominate.  This dissonance exemplifies the neoliberal ‘zombie effect’. Dead ideas embedded in the original NAFTA project continue to move forward in an unstoppable zombie manner; once buried projects can also return to life.  This is the case of the ‘dead chapter’ of NAFTA to open the petroleum sector. By 2013 the Mexican government--constantly pressured by US oil transnationals since Mexico removed the sector from the original negotiations in 1993—had succumbed: the oil sector will be ‘returned to’ international interests (or their surrogates) according to the status quo ante of petroleum nationalization.  This demonstrates the general evolutionary process of NAFTA: there is no end, nor evidence to halt this trajectory because the deification of the market is based in the magical metaphysics of Friedman and Hayek. For the less-developed nations, the neoliberal projects forces conformance to the zombie ‘law’ of comparative advantage—born dead, but continuing to live.