The Pacific Alliance in a World of Preferential Trade Agreement - Lessons in Comparative Regionalism

The Pacific Alliance (PA or the “Alliance”) has appeared as a new effort of regional integration in Latin America, which today includes Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Two countries are in the process of negotiating to become full members of the PA – Costa Rica and Panama, and some others like Paraguay, a member of MERCOSUR, are approaching the PA and analysing the process of further integration with that bloc.

As a whole, the PA constitutes the eighth largest economy and represents the seventh largest exporting entity worldwide. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the bloc represents 36% of the GDP, concentrates 50% of the total trade and attracts 41% of the direct foreign investment that flows to the region. The four countries have a total population of 212 million people, mostly young with an average GDP per capita of 10 thousand dollars. The PA aims to build, in a participatory and consensual manner, an area of deep economic integration and to move gradually toward the free circulation of goods, services, capital and persons. Taking a different approach than other integration efforts in the region (MERCOSUR, Andean Community, ALBA), the PA has been defined as a pragmatic, flexible and “goal oriented” organization. In that context, only two main documents have been developed as foundational documents of the Alliance: the PA Framework Agreement (2012), containing the parameters, institutional architecture and rules that will govern the process of political and economic articulation and cooperation, and the PA Additional Protocol (2014) which liberalizes trade and covers a wider scope including trade in goods, services, investment, and government procurement, among others. A recent amendment of this Protocol (2015) included a new chapter on regulatory improvement.

Because of these distinctive characteristics of the PA, there is much interest, from the international community, in the future developments of the Alliance, and 32 countries have already been accepted as “observer” States, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, Paraguay, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay. However, almost all documents relating to the Alliance are in Spanish – the official language of the four Member States – a feature that reduces the ability to compare the achievements of the PA with other efforts of regional integration.

The conference is open to scholars, practitioners and officers of public, regional and international organisations interested in a critical analysis of the Alliance. The programme includes contributions from various disciplines, including law, political science and economics. With the objective of presenting the developments of the Pacific Alliance to a wider audience, English will be the language of the conference proceedings and of the papers presented.