NAFTA the Concept of Unification Term Paper

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Employers and employees therefore now have an increased opportunity to utilize their talents under NAFTA. Canada's employment rate has for example increased by 17.5% since the inception of the Trade Agreement (Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada).

As mentioned above, other important matters have also received attention under NAFTA. Environmentalism has an increasingly important part not only of sustainable economic growth, but also of politics. This serves as another unifying factor of the three countries under NAFTA. Concern for the environment then connects with a concern for the human factor in terms of working conditions. NAFTA therefore focuses on a shared concern for the interconnection between humanity and the environment within which human beings function. As such, the three member countries are involved in several parallel environmental and labor agreements. Specifically, for example, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation successfully enforces environmental laws in all three member countries. This reinforces the unifying function of NAFTA in a general concern for the environment and a standardization of laws focusing on this issue. The North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation combines the efforts of the United States and Mexico in protecting the basic rights of workers (Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada).

The three countries under NAFTA are therefore unified not only in terms of the initially envisioned economic sphere, but also in terms of other issues such as environmentalism and political matters.
Despite all these benefits however, there are those who are less optimistic regarding the current results and future prospects of the Trade Agreement.

The opponents of the Agreement for example countered the positive assertions of its proponents with predictions of lowered wages, the destruction of existing good jobs in the United States, the undermining of democratic control in domestic policy and a degradation of health, environmental and food safety (Public Citizen).

The reason for these warnings lies in the divergent nature of the development level within the three unified countries. The level of development in Mexico, for example is closer in standard to the third world than to the United States, whereas the U.S. development level is much higher than that of both the other countries in the Agreement. The problem resides in the NAFTA document, containing a single set of rules to apply to the domestic laws of all three countries (Public Citizen). This unification, as argued by opponents, can lead to nothing but the above-mentioned disasters. Unification in any sense is necessarily a problematic issue in terms of diversity. Nevertheless, this issue does have many benefits, as seen above......

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"NAFTA The Concept Of Unification", 17 September 2006, Accessed.29 April. 2024,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/nafta-concept-unification-71708