Studious, friendly and quick with humorous asides, Tony Villamil is an unlikely candidate to find himself at the center of a pointed -- and sometimes heated -- debate.
Yet his analysis of the economic impact of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas has drawn a host of skeptics and critics, particularly among labor groups opposed to the FTAA.
Villamil is the author of a study that concluded that Florida would stand to gain 89,000 jobs if an FTAA were established and its secretariat located in Miami.
Perhaps most surprising, he found that if an FTAA were established but based in another U.S. city, it would be a worst-case scenario for Florida -- worse, even, than if the FTAA were headquartered in another country.
While it might be expected that anti-FTAA organizations would criticize the study, the estimate of 89,000 jobs has raised other eyebrows. Georgia, which also covets the FTAA headquarters, concluded that its maximum gain would be 27,000 jobs if the secretariat were based in Atlanta. And Ken Flamm, an international economist at the University of Texas formerly with the Brookings Institution, finds Villamil's figure ``five to 10 times too high.''
The FTAA is a subject to which Villamil is particularly close. He is vice chairman of Florida FTAA and an advisor to Gov. Jeb Bush, an ardent supporter of establishing the secretariat in Miami. Villamil was also the undersecretary of commerce in the first Bush White House.
But none of that, he insists, affected his research, though he acknowledges economic forecasting to be an imprecise science.
''This is the optimal scenario,'' he says.
His suspicion, meanwhile, is that some critics are misinterpreting what the report says.
''People don't read it'' and criticize it anyway, he says. ``That's the frustrating part.''
For starters, 89,000 is an estimate reached by plugging in data from multiple sources, including the federal government and private industry.
Most notably, it is based on the assumption that exports to Latin America could triple in the decade following the establishment of an FTAA -- a ''significant assumption,'' Villamil admits.
But he's not saying that those 89,000 jobs will arrive overnight.
''It's over a 10-year period,'' he explains.
KEY GUESSTIMATE
Flamm, for one, doubts that the volume of trade would grow that much.
He figures U.S. exports to Latin America to grow by 30 percent if tariffs are eliminated.
Imports into America wouldn't grow much, he says, because ``U.S. tariffs are already pretty low.''
An increase of 89,000 jobs would be huge in South Florida -- the equivalent of 10 American Airlines. For Miami-Dade County, it would represent an 8.6 percent increase. Even if the three South Florida metropolitan counties were lumped together, it would still represent a sizable improvement of 5.1 percent.
But while South Florida stands to benefit the most, Villamil says the jobs would be spread around the state. And in a statewide labor pool of over seven million people, 89,000 new jobs would be less impressive -- a gain of just over 1 percent.
''On the net, we get 89,000,'' Villamil says. ``It's a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game.''
That said, he remains sensitive to the contention that jobs would be lost in some industries and found in others.
''There are going to be winners and losers,'' he says. And that would mean that ''we'd have to retool the workforce,'' with training and other forms of assistance for new jobs.
WIN-WIN? HOW-HOW?
Critics counter that the win-win theory of a free-trade bloc simply doesn't work.
''This is the goofiest number,'' AFL-CIO economist Thea Lee says of Villamil's projection. ``That number doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.''
Pointing to the decade-old North American Free Trade Agreement as example, critics contend that trade pacts between the world's richest nation and much poorer ones create an insurmountable disadvantage for high-paid U.S. workers -- and that jobs roll toward the lower-cost producer.
''Ten years of NAFTA have meant 10 years of net losses for American working families,'' says Robert Scott, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which plans to release on Monday a study titled ``The High Cost of Free Trade.''
''With the flow of jobs and capital out of the United States,'' Scott says, ``all 50 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a net loss of jobs over the decade.''
The numbers dispute that: There are 138 million employed Americans today; there were 120.8 million employed Americans a decade ago.
Still, the losses have been withering in manufacturing -- more than three million dropped from payrolls since 2000 alone.
''They are negotiating another agreement that looks like the ones that have failed us,'' Lee said at a recent rally in Miami.
Others say the explanation for the loss of manufacturing jobs isn't that simple. For one thing, many jobs have migrated to China, not Mexico. The United States does not have a free-trade agreement with China.
In that regard, the FTAA reflects an increasingly global economy, a process that will continue regardless of whether the FTAA is established.
''The FTAA has nothing to do with the process of globalization,'' says Luis Lauredo, a leader of the effort to land the group's headquarters in Miami.
``That train has left the station. It's just the reality.''
STATE'S WORST DREAM
Villamil's own conclusion is that only a few hundred jobs would be created by the establishment of the secretariat in Miami.
Why, then, does he believe that an FTAA based elsewhere in the United States would comprise the worst-case scenario for Florida?
Because, he says, Florida, particularly South Florida, would lose its franchise as the Latin American business capital, the direct investment by foreign companies wanting to be near the secretariat would go elsewhere and trade patterns would follow suit.
''How can we sell ourselves as the Gateway to the Americas when decisions are made elsewhere?'' he asks.
Even if his study turns out to have been overly optimistic, it demonstrates that if there's going to be an FTAA, South Florida must position itself to play a leadership role in it, says Frank Nero, head of the Beacon Council economic development agency.
''Even if Tony's numbers are way off and you divide the results by half,'' Nero notes, ``40,000 jobs ain't bad.''
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