INTERNATIONAL TRADE REGIMES IN SERVICES AND INVESTMENTS

THE AMERICAN STANDARD INFERRED FROM THE USMCA

Abstract

The article seeks to examine the development of international trade regimes in services – specifically financial services, telecommunications and digital services – and in investment, drawing a comparison between the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). The Trump Administration takes the trade deficit as a yardstick to determine just how far other countries have “taken advantage” of the United States. It has been seeking obsessively to increase exports and reduce imports from the country. Since US services sector represents an asset to the economy and a driving force for job creation in the country, the rules on trade in services and investment have been taken as strategic and occupied a prominent place in the current trade agenda. Nevertheless, such rules reflect many long-standing bipartisan goals. In the 1990s they were forcibly inserted by American negotiators in the international trade forums in order to favoring in the greatest extent the US in the economic competition. Nowadays, with the USMCA, which mirrors much of the content of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), they again work in favor of the political and economic structures of the United States.