The Pacific Alliance is a regional economic integration initiative in
Latin America, which was created on April 28, 2011 by the presidents of Chile,
Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
The Alliance pursuits three main objectives:
1.
Build a
deep economic integration among its members, moving gradually Howard a free
circulation of goods, but also services, capital and people.
2.
Promote
the growth, development and competitiveness of all members’ economies in order
to achieve a greater welfare and social equality.
3.
Become a
platform for political articulation and trade integration, projecting its
strengths to the Asia Pacific region and to the whole World.
Although there are more economic integrations in Latin America that
promote trade growth, the Pacific Alliance is characterized by being sui
generis in the process it follows in order to achieve its objectives. Normally, the integration process comprises 6
stages:
MERCOSUR has already a customs union and has already some
characteristics of a common market, although it has not achieved it yet. And
the only integration in the world with an economic and monetary union is the European
Union.
The Pacific Alliance is nowadays in the free trade level, due to the
fact that all its four members have signed a free trade agreement. What makes
it sui generis, aside from a great stress in an integral cooperation, is the
fact that it pursuits to have in the future a common market without having
before a customs union.
The reason behind this is members consider that unifying their customs
would reduce its liberty to celebrate agreements with third countries and enjoy
the benefits from preferential trade with others, what has already been proven
in the case of MERCOSUR. When a country is part of a customs union it must
apply the same rules and tariffs as their partners, without giving any special
treatment to foreign trade. In the case of the Pacific Alliance once the common
market is a reality, there will be a free circulation of goods, services, capital
and people among the members but they will still be able to individually
promote trade with other parts of the world, e.g. Mexico in NAFTA.
This special integration process and other aspects that will be
explained later, have attracted the attention of countries that want to be part
of it and others that are following carefully all the actions of the Alliance:
•Costa Rica is in already in accession process
•Panama was part of the initiative to create the Pacific Alliance but it
remained as an observer country because it didn’t fulfill the requirement of
having a free trade agreement with the other four countries. Panama started working on free trade
agreements with Colombia and Mexico, which were signed in September 2013 and
April 2014 respectively. As soon as the agreement with Mexico is ratified,
Panama will be able to start the accession process.
•There are 29 economies in all continents registered as observer
countries:
o
America:
Canada, USA, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Panama,
Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay.
o
Asia:
Israel, India, China, Singapore, Korea and Japan.
o
Europe:
Portugal, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland,
Germany, Finland and Turkey.
o
Africa:
Morocco
o
Oceania:
Australia and New Zealand.
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