Public
FTAA.soc/w/158/Add.1
August 31, 2001

Original: Spanish
Translation: FTAA Secretariat

FTAA - COMMITTEE OF GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES ON THE PARTICIPATION OF
CIVIL SOCIETY

CONTRIBUTION IN RESPONSE TO THE OPEN INVITATION

Executive summary

Free trade area of the Americas

To be successful, FTAA negotiations have to take place within the ongoing process of globalization of the world economy. As is well known, globalization in the commercial field seeks liberalization of goods and services trade, and in investment, together with greater protection for intellectual property rights. As a result, it is expected that the international production of goods and services will be relocated, restructured and/or decentralized. In this regard, the 1998 WTO report states “an increasingly smaller number of products can today be produced competitively on the basis of national inputs alone”; and it adds, “trade in components and parts is growing considerably faster than trade in finished products.” Consequently, in the FTAA negotiations, developing countries should seek to become part of this new international trade structure, granting concessions on tariffs and non-tariff barriers in selected strategic sectors, complementing this with higher levels of protection for intellectual property rights, and stronger guarantees for foreign investment to enable it to contribute to the development process with technology and capital. Developed countries, for their part, should stop producing articles in which they are not competitive, and focus instead on high-technology sectors and those which characterize the new economy. This new distribution of labor will significantly reduce the need for countries to have recourse to non-tariff measures such as subsidies, dumping, safeguard measures, technical barriers etc, or raise tariffs to protect inefficient production.

To afford greater security to trade concessions arising from the FTAA process, and to prevent countries devaluing their currencies in order to make their exports more competitive vis-à-vis other FTAA member countries, it would be useful to set up a negotiating group to analyze the advisability of adopting a single currency—which could be the dollar, given that a number of American countries have already adopted it.


This document has been previously distributed in error as FTAA.soc/w/158, dated Octuber 24, 2000.