Free Trade Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The various Latin American and Caribbean free trade agreements have not been successful. This is due to a number of underlying elements within the region and, more recently, to unfavorable external economic conditions. The oil shocks and the external debt crisis placed intra-Latin American trade at a low priority. Overlapping and inaction now beset the Latin American Association for Integration, the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market, and the Caribbean Community and Common Market. Recent bilateral and multilateral initiatives in Latin America have failed to clarify the issues. Mexico is seeking integration with the United States and Canada. The Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, on the other hand, envisions a vague hemispheric free-trade area. As certain Latin American countries become increasingly capable of exporting manufactures on a competitive basis to world markets, intraregional trade will also develop, provided joint ventures are carried out, tariffs are lowered, and nontariff barriers are eliminated within the region.

Networks of Trade Protest in the Americas: Toward a New Labor Internationalism?

“…The many regional integration initiatives dating from this period were considered an essential part of the model, because greater regional integration would provide incipient industries with access to the larger markets they needed. In spite of the progress of some initiatives in liberalizing trade in the region, however, by the end of the 1970s, negotiations had stalled (Urquidi 1993).…”

Identification and ranking the factors influencing the performance of the incentive policies of free trade zones

“…Free trade zones (Urquidi, 1993) are important regions for development of business activities (Facchini & Willmann, 1999) and detecting important factors for development of these regions plays essential role for development of economy (Krugman, 1991;Miyagiwa, 1993;Rasiah, 1993;Zacharias Ma, 2015). There have been several studies on detecting barriers on development of free zones in the world.…”