Americas Bush administration links trade to security. Consequently, new trade initiatives being put forward by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick can advance the president’s goal of extending peace through economic prosperity, says Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Zoellick has proposed admitting 65 percent of all consumer and industrial imports from Latin America duty-free upon implementation of a hemispheric free-trade agreement. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is committed to signing such an agreement before 2005.
According to O’Driscoll, consumers of the world would benefit from these actions and efficient farmers, many of them Americans, would prosper.
In addition, O’Driscoll says Zoellick can pursue an even bolder agenda, one with a coalition of willing trade partners countries already open to trade and investment. Such a grouping, he says, would enable negotiation to start from a higher threshold and would permit the Bush administration to “raise the bar” on other trade negotiations, including those within the WTO.
Other countries could join by first liberalising to the threshold already established by the association, O’Driscoll says.
Source: Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., Is a Global Free-Trade Deal the Best Way to Keep the United States Safe? Investor’s Business Daily, February 21, 2003.
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FMF Policy Bulletin/4 March 2003
