Mexico Didn't Hit the Jackpot With Nafta

Since 1993, the year before the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, per capita gross domestic product in Mexico is up about 26 percent in real terms. That's a lot better than the outright decline in per capita GDP that the country had experienced over the course of the 1980s. But it's nowhere close to the 41 percent gains in real GDP per capita experienced by Canada and the U.S., the other signatories of Nafta,1523989215201 not to mention China, where GDP per capita is up more than 600 percent since 1993:

The picture might be slightly better than this for the median Mexican worker, given that by some measures income inequality declined in the country for a decade or so starting in the mid-to-late 1990s. Then again, a 2017 study by Ingrid Bleynat and Paul Segal of King's College London and Amílcar Challú of Bowling Green State University, which estimated income inequality by dividing average wages of construction workers in the Mexico City area by per capita GDP, found that this inequality never fell below pre-Nafta levels and has been rising again lately.