The North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal that began integrating the Mexican economy with the United States and Canada in the 1990s, has been a politically charged topic for decades.
Centrist Democrats and Republicans supported the agreement as a way to strengthen the North American economy. But its legacy has been mixed. In some parts of the United States, the agreement shuttered factories and put people out of work as companies moved production to Mexico, where labor was cheaper. President Trump won over unions and other workers as a candidate by labeling NAFTA the “worst agreement ever” and promising to improve or scrap it.
A new paper adds to the understanding of NAFTA’s costs. In it, economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago found that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994.
The new study concludes, for example, that in the first 15 years of NAFTA, about 3 percent of 45-year-old men lost a year of their remaining life expectancy as a result of the trade deal. The researchers saw increases in mortality across most major causes of death, including illness, drug overdoses and suicides. The overall trends particularly affected working-age men, and were more pronounced in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest, like Michigan.
Matthew Notowidigdo, one of the report’s authors, said in an interview that the work highlighted an “underappreciated cost of globalization.” In the cities and towns facing new competition from Mexican factories, “life expectancy falls, and it hits really hard on men,” he said.
“We’re talking about a lot of life years lost,” he added.
The changes, he said, were large enough to outweigh prior estimates about NAFTA’s nationwide benefits, including cheaper goods for consumers.
The findings come as the Trump administration gears up for yet another fight over NAFTA. Mr. Trump did not scrap the deal during his first term but instead renegotiated it and renamed it the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
But Mr. Trump now says the U.S.M.C.A. is not working, and the three countries are scheduled to have a “joint review” of the agreement this summer. The Trump administration has said it will renew the agreement only if certain issues are resolved, including the trade deficits the United States runs with Mexico and Canada and other trading behaviors the administration deems unfair.
Mr. Notowidigdo agreed that Mr. Trump and his advisers had picked up on the harms that NAFTA had caused many workers around the United States. “To give Donald Trump and some of his administration some credit, I think economists have probably had an overly rosy view of NAFTA,” he said.
But Mr. Notowidigdo said he did not want his paper to be interpreted as a call to “go back to the world before NAFTA, hoping that in that world, these manufacturing jobs come back.”
“It’s very hard to imagine that taking place,” he said.
Mr. Notowidigdo also cautioned that NAFTA might have had other benefits that his paper didn’t capture, including in innovation or in helping North America as a whole remain competitive against other parts of the world.
U.S. factory work probably would have declined even without NAFTA, just not as rapidly, Mr. Notowidigdo said. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was a significant source of competition. And trends in automation, technology and offshoring have meant that most rich nations — and even some poorer ones — are seeing rates of manufacturing employment decline.
“What NAFTA did is it accelerated it,” Mr. Notowidigdo said. He pointed to other countries, like Denmark, that had set up systems to help support and retrain workers who had lost their jobs.
Several of the report’s authors previously studied the effects on American life spans of the Great Recession beginning in 2008. In a surprising finding, they concluded that the recession had extended Americans’ life spans — in part because people ended up driving less, and therefore had fewer fatal accidents, and because less driving and economic activity translated into less air pollution.
But they found that NAFTA had the opposite effect, as did the so-called China shock, when many American factories moved to China after the country joined the W.T.O. .
The economists sought to demonstrate causation, not just correlation, between NAFTA and the increase in mortality. First, to determine the group with high exposure to NAFTA, they identified parts of the country that had the most employment in industries where import tariffs were lowered. Then they compared those places with those not exposed to NAFTA to see how the trade deal changed communities.
Gordon Hanson, a Harvard economist who has studied NAFTA but was not affiliated with the study, praised the paper and its methodology. He said it highlighted how manufacturing-led economic declines were different from broad recessions, in that they hit a subset of communities highly specialized in manufacturing, leading to issues like more stress and substance abuse.
NAFTA created a single market for about a third of the world’s economic production, and led to the gradual removal of tariffs on the continent over the next 15 years.
The United States and Canada already had a free-trade agreement, so the main impact of NAFTA was the integration of Mexico, where wages were much lower. While the agreement was strongly motivated by foreign policy reasons, economists thought it would also benefit the U.S. economy, at least somewhat.
Many economic analyses eventually found that the welfare gains for the United States from NAFTA were fairly small. That’s because trade accounts for a smaller percentage of the U.S. economy than it does for many other nations.
But in certain parts of the United States where factories moved overseas, the negative effects of NAFTA were concentrated. Because manufacturing jobs were more unionized and tended to be highly paid, especially for men with less education, workers who lost their factory jobs tended to end up in much worse situations.
Previous academic research found that factory closures led to earlier deaths among local workers, whether from disease, drug overdose or other causes. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown that the decline of manufacturing was connected with higher rates of opioid addition and “deaths of despair” from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
Other research has shown that areas more exposed to NAFTA saw declines in wages and employment, and a shift in political support away from the Democratic Party toward Republicans and Mr. Trump.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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