Economy
In a world economy reshaped by a virus, the new North American trade deal takes effect – CBC.ca
As negotiators shook hands on the revised North American free trade agreement, they couldn’t have foreseen the fundamental upheaval their countries would soon be facing thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
If the Trudeau government is looking to celebrate something this Canada Day, it may be the relative security of the status quo that was more or less preserved in the talks.
“Bullet dodged” — that’s how Brett House, Scotiabank’s deputy chief economist, summed things up for CBC News last weekend.
“Sometimes,” he said, “the biggest victories are the bad things prevented, rather than new things built.”
Unlike Canada’s original trade deals with the U.S. and the other major trade deals the Trudeau government has implemented with European and Pacific Rim partners, the new NAFTA doesn’t substantially liberalize more trade. Most North American tariffs had been eliminated already.
The new automotive chapter, in contrast, adds more protectionism by requiring manufacturers to use more local components and higher labour standards to avoid tariffs.
When Global Affairs released its economic impact study for the new agreement last winter, it was criticized for basing its comparisons not on the terms of the original NAFTA but a hypothetically devastating scenario in which President Donald Trump completely pulled the plug on preferential trade with Canada.
How likely was that? Opinions still vary as to whether the Trudeau government had any real alternative to going along with the renegotiation.
As last week’s threat to reimpose aluminum tariffs suggests, this White House remains unpredictable and, sometimes, unthinkable, even in the face of strong economic arguments about the value of free trade with one’s neighbours.
‘Negative on balance’
In attempting to modernize NAFTA for the 21st century, did negotiators meet the standard of “first, do no harm”?
In a paper released Tuesday by the C.D. Howe Institute, consultant trade economist Dan Ciuriak revisited the economic modelling done by the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. International Trade Commission and Global Affairs Canada, as well as his own figures, and tried to make sense of how things look now — amid the chaos of a pandemic that’s disrupted international supply chains, shut down all but essential cross-border travel and introduced a new public health rationale for constricting trade on national security grounds.
“There are many sources of uncertainty that at present do not lend themselves to a robust quantification,” his summary concludes. “The known knowns promise to be negative on balance; as for the known unknowns, time will tell.”
“Just as companies were starting to prepare and think about [NAFTA implementation], COVID came,” said Brian Kingston, outgoing vice-president responsible for trade issues at the Business Council of Canada.
“Their focus is turned 100 per cent to survival and making sure that they can get through this pandemic intact.”
Despite the pandemic (or perhaps to distract from it), Trump demanded a June 1 implementation date. When he couldn’t get that, he insisted on a July 1 implementation, to make sure a done deal was ready to campaign on this fall.
Rather than risk more punishment and political grief by stalling, Canada and Mexico agreed, paving the way for the Canada Day starting line.
For Canada, starting in July instead of August is very expensive for its dairy sector — and perhaps for the taxpayers who ultimately will compensate farmers for it. The dairy fiscal year begins in August, and since NAFTA concessions ramp up at the start of each new dairy year, that ramp is steeper with this timing.
One innovation in the original NAFTA now begins to vanish from the corporate toolkit: the investor-state dispute system (ISDS), which let companies bypass regular courts and challenge the regulatory decisions of Canadian governments directly through NAFTA arbitration (ISDS is also referred to by its location in the original text: “Chapter 11”).
The ability of multinationals to seek millions in damages in such lawsuits “was always something that critics of the original NAFTA deal hated,” said cross-border trade lawyer Mark Warner. “So that’s a pretty big change.”
Other changes businesses need to adapt to, like the copyright changes in the intellectual property chapter, are “largely a wash,” Warner said.
Bumpy road for carmakers
The new NAFTA’s uniform regulations for automotive manufacturing have only been out for a couple of weeks — during a time when carmakers have been preoccupied with reviving their supply chains and factories from the relative coma of this spring’s lockdown.
“Without COVID, this would have been the most important issue facing that most important industry, and now this is probably a distant second,” said Warner.
“I don’t think anyone in auto … has really had time to concentrate the mind on [the new NAFTA] coming into effect. I think we’re going to see a delayed reaction that plays out over time.”
Will the revised agreement eventually fulfil Trump’s pledge of returning more automotive jobs and investment to the U.S. (and Canada)? Or will manufacturers opt to comply by paying Mexican workers more, as some Japanese facilities are already signalling? Could some skip NAFTA compliance altogether?
Trade law professor Elizabeth Trujillo from the University of Houston said that while the new labour provisions are consistent with the populist values of Mexico’s current president, complete compliance with new labour standards on the Mexican side is “unlikely.”
“Will that be enforced? If it is, what does that mean? More tariffs?” she said.
It’s now possible for claims of labour violations to be pursued against Mexico under NAFTA’s now-revised state-to-state dispute resolution process.
“The more likely scenario is that a lot of these manufacturers will just not use the new NAFTA … they’ll work outside of it,” Trujillo said. “Just pay what they have to pay [in tariffs] and not have to adjust their way of doing things to the new rules.”
As it reworks its supply chain strategy, Mexico may collaborate with other countries — especially other Latin American countries that also have free trade agreements with the U.S., like Colombia, she said.
Trade professor Meredith Lilly of Carleton University, a former adviser to Stephen Harper’s government, predicts “real bumps” ahead as this sector transitions to the new rules while trying to remain globally competitive.
“Over the long term, eventually the price of cars is going to go up,” she said, pointing out that North American components and labour will be more expensive.
De minimis, dairy changes kick in
Not every sector faces as many new rules as the automotive industry. For regular consumers, changes attributable to NAFTA may be almost undetectable.
“The biggest win is that Canadians won’t see a lot of change,” Kingston said. “The less that we see is actually a sign that the agreement is working as planned.”
There are a few small consumer gains.
With online shopping and shipping more popular than ever, goods shipped from by U.S. by courier services no longer face customs duties if they’re valued under $150, and won’t incur sales taxes if they’re worth less than $40. If purchases are shipped by mail, however, the previous threshold of $20 will still apply.
While the market access conceded to the U.S. for supply-managed agricultural products like dairy, eggs and poultry should, in theory, spur more competitive pricing and add more choice to store shelves, it’s not a given that will happen.
The pandemic has dramatically disrupted food supplies and prices, which might make any concurrent NAFTA changes hard to spot.
The new licences to import American products will also be given mostly to Canadian processors, not retailers — something the Americans have threatened to fight because they don’t trust Canada’s domestic industry to deliver the market share promised to U.S. farmers.
Sour relations
While the implementation of the new NAFTA could have been an opportunity to relaunch Canada-U.S. trade relations with a more positive attitude, Lilly said she fears this opportunity has been lost. Instead, the pandemic has left Canadians with a bad taste in their mouths about their neighbours.
The Trump administration’s attempt to prevent 3M from shipping N95 masks to Canada is an example of how there’s “no loyalty and no love lost” between the partners in the North American trading bloc right now, she said.
“It’s caused Canadians to reflect a great deal,” she said, adding she worries the Trudeau government’s ambitions for diversified trade aren’t shared by the general public.
Hassan Yussuff, the president of the Canadian Labour Council who also served on Canada’s NAFTA advisory council during the negotiations, said he hopes the deal brings positive changes to the lives of working people in Mexico. He said he also hopes the new NAFTA regulations, in turn, will make employers think twice about leaving Canada in the first place — easing the resentment workers felt about the original NAFTA deal.
COVID-19 is prompting countries to re-examine how far they have pushed the envelope on international trade, and to revisit the idea of making certain things at home, he said.
“We cannot be this vulnerable,” Yussuff said. And even if there is a new president in the White House after November, he added, domestic political pressures will remain.
“Americans always act in their own self-interest. We should not think we’re special. We have to be vigilant, and get used to this.”
German politicians and business leaders, despairing a weak economy, are lately broaching a once taboo topic: claiming their compatriots don’t work enough. They may have a point.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner fired the latest salvo in this fractious debate last week when he said that “in Italy, France and elsewhere they work a lot more than we do.” Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a Green Party representative, grumbled in March about workers striking, something a country beset by labor shortages “cannot afford.” (Later that month train drivers secured a 35-hour workweek instead of 38, for the same pay.) Signaling his opposition to a four-day work week, Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing in January urged Germans “to work more and work harder.”
Canada stands to bear a greater economic burden than the United States if Donald Trump wins the upcoming presidential election and imposes promised tax cuts and tariffs on all U.S. imports, a new report warns.
The analysis released Tuesday by Scotiabank Economics says if Trump returns to the White House and follows through on his vow to slap a 10-per cent tariff on all imported goods — with the exception of China, which would face a 60-per cent carve-out on its U.S. exports — and countries retaliate with their own, there would be “substantial negative impacts” on the U.S. economy. GDP would likely fall by more than two per cent by 2027 relative to current forecasts, while inflation would rise 1.5 per cent, leading to a two per cent interest rate hike.
In Canada, the economic impact would be even more stark with an expected GDP drop of 3.6 per cent, given its reliance on trade with the U.S. Inflation and interest rates would also be pushed up for the next two years — 1.7 per cent and 190 basis points, respectively — the report suggests.
“What Trump is looking to do is much broader, and much more concerning, than the tariffs he imposed during his first term,” said Scotiabank’s chief economist Jean-François Perrault, who authored the report.
The report also serves as another reminder that Canada needs to urgently address its issues with lagging productivity, warning the problem makes Canada more vulnerable to economic shocks brought by trade policy changes in the U.S. and abroad.
Perrault says it’s far too late to fix the problem in time for the U.S. election in November.
“It takes a long time to change direction on productivity,” he said in an interview. “Maybe you can make up some ground over the next few quarters, but we need massive amounts of progress to get to where we need to be (to withstand U.S. economic shocks).”
Trump’s policies seen as more likely than Biden’s
Although the analysis examined the impact of policies proposed by both Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden, it focuses more on the fallout from Trump’s promises.
That’s because they’re not only more potentially harmful, Perrault said, but also because they’re more likely to be implemented than Biden’s vow to raise the corporate tax rate.
“There’s really no appetite in the U.S. right now for any kind of tax hike,” Perrault said.
Implementing a change to the corporate tax rate would require Biden’s Democrat party to control both chambers of Congress — a scenario seen as highly unlikely, given recent polling. Trump’s proposals, meanwhile, are seen as more likely to be implemented quickly and without congressional approval, particularly his expanded tariffs.
During his presidency, Trump imposed tariffs on about US$50 billion worth of Chinese goods imported to the U.S., later expanding to another US$300 billion, sparking a trade war with China. Many of those tariffs have remained in place under the Biden administration.
Trump also slapped tariffs up to 25 per cent on imported washing machines, solar panels, steel and aluminum in 2018. Canada and Mexico were later exempted from the steel and aluminum tariffs in 2019, although the Canadian aluminum tariff was briefly reintroduced in 2020.
U.S. government data shows those tariffs — none of which were legislated or approved by Congress — have cost American manufacturers more than US$230 billion as of March 2024 and have shrunk the U.S. economy by 0.3 per cent.
Trump has repeatedly claimed tariffs serve to punish unfair trade practices from other countries, despite agreement among economists that they raise prices for American consumers, and says he wants to expand them to 10 per cent on all imported goods from every country if he wins in November. He has also said he will seek a 100 per cent tariff on imported cars, and carve out a 60 per cent tariff for Chinese imports specifically.
The most likely scenario — a continuation of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts beyond their 2025 expiration combined with across-the-board tariffs — would see Canada’s GDP stay three per cent lower long-term, and just over one-per cent lower in the U.S.
The Scotiabank report says the economic harm from the tariffs can be reduced on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border if Canada and Mexico negotiate an exemption with the U.S. under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during the Trump administration.
Scotiabank predicts in that scenario, Canada’s GDP would only fall by 1.4 per cent in the short term — half the drop forecast without an exemption — and 0.3 per cent in the long term, while U.S. GDP would fall 1.7 per cent and 1.2 per cent, respectively.
Perrault says he’s “hopeful” such a carve-out could be negotiated, even though Trump would likely insist on further concessions that benefit U.S. trade. That “bigger stick” approach could be somewhat limited compared to the contentious CUSMA negotiations, however.
“Trump owns CUSMA, so he wouldn’t be in as much of a position to throw it away,” he said. “So maybe we get a little bit of a break.”
The report also examines the impact of Trump’s repeated vow to mass deport roughly 10 million undocumented immigrants living illegally in the U.S., which Perrault admits would be “politically and logistically infeasible.” It would also be economically harmful, the analysis found, permanently reducing both U.S. employment and GDP by three per cent, though the impact on Canada would be negligible.
The analysis says Canada and the U.S. could see additional economic impacts due to a number of scenarios it didn’t explore, including China retaliating to tariffs by unloading its U.S. Treasury holdings; further debt ceiling and budgetary crises in the U.S.; Trump’s appeasement of aggressive foreign adversaries like Russia and China; and domestic civil disorder regardless of who wins the U.S. elections.
Perrault said the findings also underscore the key difference between Trump and Biden as Canadian trade partners.
“Biden seems to view negotiations from a collaborative approach: how can everyone come away with a win?” he said. “Trump doesn’t see it that way. He’s very much in the mindset of, ‘How will this benefit me?’”
More on Money
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
More than six months into the devastating Gaza war, its impact on the Israeli and Palestinian economies has been huge.
Nearly all economic activity in Gaza has been wiped out and the World Bank says the war has also hit Palestinian businesses in the occupied West Bank hard.
As Israelis mark the Jewish festival of Passover, the much-vaunted “start-up nation” is also trying to remain an attractive proposition for investors.
The cobbled streets of Jerusalem’s Old City are eerily quiet. There are none of the long queues to visit the holy sites – at least those that remain open.
Just after Easter and Ramadan and right in the middle of Passover, all four quarters of the Old City should be teeming with visitors.
Just 68,000 tourists arrived in Israel in February, according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That’s down massively from 319,100 visitors in the same month last year.
While it may be surprising that any visitors pass through Jerusalem at a time of such tension, many of those who do are religious pilgrims from across the globe who will have paid for their journeys well in advance.
Zak’s Jerusalem Gifts was one of only a handful of stores on Christian Quarter Street in the Old City, which is situated in occupied East Jerusalem, to have bothered opening up on the day I passed by.
“We’re only really doing online sales,” says Zak, whose business specialises in antiques and biblical coins.
“There are no actual people. The last week, after the Iran-Israel escalation, business dropped down again. So we are just hoping that after the holidays some big major miracle will happen.”
It’s not just in Jerusalem’s Old City that they need a miracle.
Some 250km (150 miles) further north, on Israel’s volatile border with Lebanon, almost daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah since the war in Gaza began have forced the Israeli army to close much of the area and 80,000 residents have been evacuated further south. A similar number of Lebanese have been forced to leave their homes on the other side of the border.
Agriculture in this part of Israel is another economic sector that has been hit hard.
Ofer “Poshko” Moskovitz isn’t really permitted to enter his avocado orchard in the kibbutz of Misgav Am because of its proximity to the border. But he occasionally ventures in anyway, walking wistfully among the trees, to gaze at all of his “money falling on the ground”.
“I must go to pick in the orchard because it’s very important for the next season,” Poshko says. “If I don’t pick this fruit, the next season will be a very poor one.”
He says he is losing a lot of money because he can’t pick the avocados – around 2m shekels ($530,000; £430,000) this season, he says.
Although they provide a living for thousands of people, agriculture and tourism account for relatively small parts of both the Israeli or Palestinian economies.
So what does the wider picture show?
Last week ratings agency S&P Global cut Israel’s long-term ratings (to A-plus from AA-minus) reflecting a loss of market confidence after increased tensions between Israel and Iran and concerns the war in Gaza could spread across the wider Middle East.
That loss of confidence was also reflected in falling Israeli GDP – the total value of goods and services produced in the economy – which decreased by 5.7% in the last quarter of 2023. Many Israelis though say the country’s renowned high-tech and start-up sector is proving to be more “war-proof” than expected.
The coastal city of Tel Aviv is only 54km from Jerusalem. More pertinently, perhaps, it’s less than 70km from Gaza.
At times, you’d be forgiven for forgetting – however momentarily – that Israel is embroiled in its longest war since independence in 1948.
Families make the most of the early summer sun to play in the surf, couples eat lunch in the many open-air beach restaurants and young people strum away on guitars on the green spaces between the coastal road and the Mediterranean.
The backdrop is a city that is economically active and physically growing fast.
“They joke that Israel’s national bird should be the crane – the mechanical kind!” says Jon Medved, founder and CEO of the online global venture investment platform Our Crowd.
An engaging character with an overwhelmingly upbeat view of his world, Medved tells me that, “in the first quarter of this year, almost $2bn was invested in Israeli start-ups… We’re having one of the best years we’ve ever had. People who are engaged with Israel are not disengaging.”
Medved insists that, despite everything, Israel is still the “start-up nation” and a good option for would-be investors.
“There are 400 multinational corporations that have operations here. Not a single multinational, has closed its operation in Israel since the war.”
To an extent, Elise Brezis agrees with Mr Medved’s assessment.
The economics professor at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv acknowledges that despite the last quarter’s GDP figures, Israel’s economy remains “remarkably resilient”.
“When it comes to tourism, yes, we have a reduction in exports. But we had also reduction in imports,” says Brezis. “So in fact, the balance of payments is still okay. That’s what is so problematic is that from the data, you don’t really feel that there is such a terrible situation in Israel.”
But Prof Brezis detects a wider malaise in Israeli society that isn’t reflected in economic data.
“Israel’s economy might be robust, but Israeli society is not robust right now. It’s like looking at a person and saying, ‘Wow, his salary is high,’ […] but in fact he’s depressed. And he’s thinking, ‘What will I do with my life?’ – That’s exactly Israel today.”
If the outlook in Israel is mixed, then across the separation barrier that divides Jerusalem and Bethlehem the view from the Palestinian side is overwhelmingly bleak.
Tourism is especially important to the economies of towns like Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
While some people are still heading to Jerusalem’s sites, in the place where Christians believe Jesus was born tourism “stopped immediately” after 7 October last year, says Dr Samir Hazboun, chairman of Bethlehem’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
That’s when Hamas attacked Israeli communities near Gaza, killing about 1,200 people, mainly civilians, taking about 250 hostages and sparking the current war.
There’s huge dependence and reliance on Israel’s economy here – but Israel virtually closed off the landlocked West Bank after 7 October and this has had a disastrous impact on the life and work of many Palestinians, Dr Hazboun says.
“The Bethlehem governorate right now is closed,” he says. “There are around 43 gates [in the Israeli security barrier] but only three are open. So with between 16,000 and 20,000 Palestinian workers from our area working in Israel, immediately, they lost their income.”
The chamber of commerce says that the revenues from local Palestinians working in Israel amounted to 22bn shekels ($5.8bn) annually.
“You can imagine the impact on the economy,” says Dr Hazboun, who is particularly concerned for the prospects for younger Palestinians the longer the war continues and more the Israeli and West Bank economies decouple.
“The younger generation now are jobless, they are not working. Many of them are talented people,” he laments.
“In June I’m expecting around 30,000 new graduates from the Palestinian universities. What they will do?
In Gaza itself the economy has been completely destroyed by six months of war. Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment and ground operations have killed 34,183 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Unlike in some parts of Israel, where there is optimism around being able to ride out the storm and continue attracting investors, in the West Bank and Gaza there is little hope things will return to any kind of normal.
Germans Debate Longer Hours and Later Retirement as Economic Growth Falters – Bloomberg
Meet Shannon Waters, The Narwhal’s B.C. politics and environment reporter – The Narwhal
Deutsche Bank's Investment Bankers Step Up as Rate Boost Fades – Yahoo Canada Finance
Silver investment demand jumped 12% in 2019
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
Global Media Markets, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F – TV and Radio Broadcasting, Film and Music, Information Services, Web Content, Search Portals And Social Media, Print Media, & Cable – GlobeNewswire
-
Art23 hours ago
The unmissable events taking place during London’s Digital Art Week
-
Politics18 hours agoOpinion: Fear the politicization of pensions, no matter the politician
-
Economy23 hours ago
German Business Outlook Hits One-Year High as Economy Heals
-
Science17 hours ago
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
-
Media16 hours ago
B.C. puts online harms bill on hold after agreement with social media companies
-
Politics17 hours ago
Pecker’s Trump Trial Testimony Is a Lesson in Power Politics
-
Business16 hours ago
Oil Firms Doubtful Trans Mountain Pipeline Will Start Full Service by May 1st
-
Media15 hours ago
Trump poised to clinch US$1.3-billion social media company stock award
