The NAFTA Agreement and Market Integration Among Canada, US and Mexico: The Role of Non-Tariff Measures

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of non-tariff measures (NTM) on NAFTA agro-food trade comparing the measures implemented at the borders of participating countries, Canada, United States and Mexico, and evaluating the impact of those NTM still implemented within the NAFTA area on agro-food market integration by estimating different gravity models for the agro-food industry as a whole and for particularly relevant product categories. The overall results from the gravity model offer a measure of the impact of the different types of technical provisions and of the different degree of application of the same measure, on the agro-food trade in the NAFTA area. The picture emerging from the estimates is quite complex: overall, a net trade creation effect seems to prevail, even though the results cannot be unambigously generalized, because they are conditional to product groups and country-specific measures.International Relations/Trade,