In the News

Trade has gone digital and our agreements need to reflect this reality. The renegotiation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an opportunity to bring our trade agreements into the 21st century and the administration shouldn’t let it pass us by.

At its signing ceremony in 1993, President Clinton declared, “ours is now an era in which commerce is global and in which money, management, technology are highly mobile.” At the time, the internet was still in its nascent stage, and optimistic estimates put the number of users between 20 million to 30 million worldwide. Nearly 25 years later, as we head into the sixth round of the NAFTA renegotiations, there are approximately 3.8 billion internet users worldwide — half the world’s population — and we’re more interconnected than ever.

The explosion of internet users during the past two decades and the digitization of the global economy has fundamentally changed the way we trade, and has enabled more Americans to benefit from trade. A McKinsey study from 2016 found 86 percent of tech-based startups surveyed were involved in some form of cross-border activity. The same study also found digital flows now have a larger impact on global GDP growth than trade in traditional goods.

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