This week the USTR published Robert Lighthizer's statement regarding the result obtained by the US in the fifth round of NAFTA negotiations. He says that "While we have made progress on some of our efforts to modernize NAFTA, I remain concerned about the lack of headway. Thus far, we have seen no evidence that Canada or Mexico are willing to seriously engage in provisions that will lead to a rebalanced agreement. Absent rebalancing, we will not reach a satisfactory result ". As we can see, it seems a frustrated statement because the US has not obtained what it has wanted in the past rounds of negotiations and is that at the end of the day, the objectives of the renegotiation of NAFTA, just updated last week by the USTR, have not changed. The USA continues with the position of eliminating the trade deficit it has with Mexico and Canada, and for that it has several strategies to achieve it. For example, the Tax Reform aims to provide benefits to companies by reducing the income tax from 35 to 20%, which would cause US companies not to leave the country and increase their sales to the NAFTA region because it is proposed that regional content increases to 85%, particularly with 50% of US integration. This increase in the percentage of integration aims not only to increase sales of US products but also to eliminate the percentage of integration of non-originating components of the region that mainly come from China. Here, it is important to make an assessment regarding China because Trump's recent visit to this country did not obtain such favorable results mainly because both Russia and China agree not to carry out commercial operations in United States dollars but instead in rubles and / or in yuan that would weaken the dollar.
The Lighthizer statement also reveals that the sixth NAFTA negotiation round that will be held in January 2018 in Canada will probably be more closed than the previous ones and will follow the extreme measures in market access to eliminate the trade deficit, bordering on a seventh negotiation round very difficult for the electoral years in USA and Mexico. The reflection and question that up to now the authors propose is the following: Who are the winners with the termination of NAFTA? We´ll see.
