Trade Agreements between Unequal Partners: Does NAFTA Deal with these Inequalities?

Mexico, as so many underdeveloped countries, has been engaged in an uphill struggle in order to surmount this condition. In past decades, the government implemented an ‘import substitution’ policy to create the conditions which would allow economic development and maintain a growth rate in accordance with population growth. At the beginning of the 1980s this model was changed, and the country initiated a transition period from a closed economy with a strong government — in terms of its presence in the economic structure — to one of the most open economies in the world and an ongoing privatization of those state structures that were built over the past decades.