According to Lorenzo Caliendo, an economist at the Yale School of Management, a surge in cross-border trade and increases in real (inflation-adjusted) wages in all three countries can be attributed to NAFTA – even once other factors, like the opening of China, the peso crisis, the dot-com bubble, and the Great Recession, are taken into account. In short, as former US Secretary of State George Shultz has noted, “NAFTA has transformed the region.”