Free Trade for Dummys - or WTO 101

Phony accounting and U.S. trade policy

The net impact of trade on employment is determined by the relationships between imports, exports, and the domestic labor requirements for each type of good. An increase in exports creates demand for U.S. workers to produce those goods, while an increase in imports reduces demand for U.S. workers, either because imports displace already-existing, comparable U.S. products, or because new demand is satisfied by foreign rather than domestic products.
Although gross U.S. exports increased 61.5% between 1994 and 2000, those increases were over-shadowed by the growth in imports, which rose 80.5%, as shown in Table 1. As a result, the 1994 U.S. trade deficit of $182 billion increased 141.6% to $439 billion by 2000 (all figures are in inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars).



Ongoing barriers to U.S. exports (as well as overvaluation of the U.S. dollar) have contributed to these growing deficits, refuting the claim that NAFTA and the WTO would overcome such barriers. Instead, trade deficits have accelerated, with resulting job losses. Nearly two out of every three jobs lost

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/issuebriefs_ib184/