Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center Deputy Director Jason Marczak and Global Business and Economics Program Associate Director Garrett Workman cowrite for Roll Call on why it would be a mistake to overlook Latin America in upcoming trade negotiations:
This is a pivotal year for global trade policy. Two huge deals—namely the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership —have the potential to dramatically redefine the nature of the global economy and reinvigorate global growth. Congress has an important role to play as these negotiations move forward.
Conventional wisdom is that both agreements are primarily transatlantic and trans-Pacific accords, but Latin America is in many ways the center of their convergence. Overlooking this would be a mistake for negotiators.
Given longstanding disagreements at the WTO, these regional agreements offer the opportunity to reinvigorate international trade and investment and to create more US jobs. Over 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside our country, and trade is our best tool to sell them more products and services. Since 2009, the number of U.S. jobs supported by trade has jumped by nearly 2 million to over 11 million jobs and counting. The two mega-regional trade agreements being negotiated today would also open the door for the United States to help set high labor, environmental, investor protection, and product safety regulations that would then become global gold standards.