Four areas of deep integration—trade facilitation, regulatory cooperation, services, and state support—are priorities to improve Latin American and Caribbean countries’ GVC participation and upgrading

Deepening existing trade agreements would deliver larger gains for Latin American and Caribbean countries than adding new agreements—a dilemma facing countries with limited negotiating resources. A static, general equilibrium analysis of the longterm effects of trade reforms shows that deepening existing PTAs signed by the region’s countries would increase exports by 4.4 percent and GDP by 1.0 percent, on average (Fontagné et al. 2021). In the Pacific Alliance, Chile’s GDP would surge by 3.2 percent, Colombia’s by 1.0 percent, Mexico’s by 2.1 percent, and Peru’s by 1.8 percent. Signing new PTAs among Latin American and Caribbean countries that currently have none would also increase welfare gains, but by much less, with exports growing by 0.29 percent and GDP by 0.05 percent, on average.

GVC participation is determined by four fundamentals: geography, market size, factor endowments, and institutions (World Bank 2019). Latin American and Caribbean countries differ widely in fundamentals, but on average the region is disadvantaged compared with other regions by its relative far distance from major trading partners, smaller average domestic market size, lower capital and skilled labor endowments, and relatively inefficient institutions. DTAs can help overcome some of these disadvantages and shape the region’s GVC participation.

Trade facilitation is particularly important in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the time and cost of trading across borders are high. Border inefficiency and regulatory uncertainty are key barriers to boosting trade in low- and middle-income countries, even when tariffs are low. Completing the documents to import a standard container takes an average of 108 hours in the region’s countries—on par with Sub-Saharan African countries and countries participating in commodity GVCs but more than three times as long as in Europe and Central Asia countries and almost seven times as long as in countries specializing in advanced manufacturing and services GVCs.5 Trade facilitation can reduce tangible and intangible costs in the region by improving, simplifying, and harmonizing the procedures and controls governing the cross-border movement of goods.

DTAs can push trade facilitation reforms forward. Trade facilitation provisions in DTAs advance the free movement of goods between member countries by stipulating more advanced and sophisticated solutions than multilateral agreements contain. The DTA provisions promote coordination, collaboration, and information sharing

between relevant agencies; harmonize processes and procedures that reduce transaction costs; and establish governance structures to pursue continuous improvement of border procedures as well as compliance and enforcement.

GVCs, in which goods cross borders multiple times, often magnify the impact of trade facilitation provisions. Because firms involved in GVCs rely on the timely and reliable delivery of foreign inputs, their export competitiveness is enhanced by more efficient import procedures. An econometric analysis using firm-level data from Peru shows that trade facilitation provisions boosted the export performance of GVC firms through efficiency enhancements at Peru’s borders (Lee, Rocha, and Ruta 2021). Because many border improvements are nondiscriminatory, trade facilitation commitments in a DTA generate positive spillovers for GVC firms that import inputs from countries that are not partners to the DTA.

Commitments to trade facilitation require an effective governance structure to support implementation. Trade facilitation reforms entail major investments of time and resources over several years—a requirement that can challenge implementation, especially if the political environment is volatile. And PTA partners’ different levels of development necessitate coordinated efforts to identify solutions suitable to national contexts. For Latin American and Caribbean countries to overcome these implementation challenges and reap the full benefits of trade facilitation, provisions must promote coordination among agencies and establish a clear governance structure, such as a trade facilitation committee.

Nontariff measures (NTMs) raise trade costs in Latin American and Caribbean countries and reduce opportunities to exploit economies of scale. NTMs have important public policy goals, but divergent regulations can segment the market and raise the fixed cost of entry for foreign firms. In the region, 42 percent of imported products and 53 percent of import value are covered by NTMs (see chapter 4). The resulting high trade costs limit Latin American and Caribbean firms’ ability to exploit economies of scale from regional markets. Countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia impose even more costly NTMs on their imports— particularly in the form of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and technical barriers to trade (TBTs). The prevalence of SPS and TBT measures in those important destination markets for the region’s countries can hamper their exporting firms’ trade and growth prospects.

Although regulatory cooperation can reduce trade costs, the region’s trade agreements have a mixed record of achieving it. SPS and TBT rules in trade agreements require members to increase transparency in NTMs, promote forms of regulatory cooperation such as harmonization or mutual recognition of standards, and improve enforcement of those commitments. Including SPS and TBT rules in DTAs reduces the potential negative impact of NTMs and lowers the trade costs resulting from regulatory

divergence (Ederington and Ruta 2016). Trade agreements involving Latin American and Caribbean countries have increasingly included SPS and TBT rules, though implementation remains a challenge. Yet important differences persist. SPS provisions in the region’s agreements tend to have more binding commitments than the TBT provisions have. The SPS provisions sometimes require mutual recognition or harmonization but are less stringent than the TBT provisions regarding transparency.

Regulatory cooperation in Latin American and Caribbean agreements boosts bilateral trade and GVC integration, particularly for small and medium enterprises. SPS provisions promote agricultural and food exports, whereas TBT provisions boost overall exports and imports of intermediate inputs. Firm-level evidence for Chile, Colombia, and Peru shows that the boost to exports from SPS and TBT provisions in DTAs is larger for small firms (Fernandes, Lefebvre, and Rocha 2021). That finding is consistent with the view that DTAs reduce the fixed entry costs of exporting created by NTMs, which are especially onerous for small exporters. And DTA rules promoting transparency in SPS and TBT measures foster small firms’ exports by improving the predictability of foreign market conditions.

The implementation of SPS and TBT integration in the region’s trade agreements is a concern, but recent experience shows the way to better outcomes. Extraregional PTAs involving Latin American and Caribbean countries have been more successfully implemented than intraregional PTAs, on average, but groups of more similar countries (such as the Pacific Alliance) have found innovative approaches for regulatory cooperation. Moreover, recent extraregional and intraregional agreements alike offer lessons: trade agreements can specify concrete, binding reform outcomes expected from measures for sectors or products and can establish institutional structures with clear mandates, work programs, and defined oversight powers and resources.

Although the service economy in Latin American and Caribbean countries is large, the region’s trade in services is somewhat lower than in other regions and its integration into services GVCs is low.6 Services account for 60 percent of economic activity in the region, and services trade accounts for 7.3 percent of GDP—less than in most other regions.7

In GVCs, services are increasingly important, both as inputs into production in other sectors (including manufacturing) and as sources of production. Latin America and the Caribbean tends to be an input supplier in services GVCs but has less backward integration. Compared with other regions in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean is less integrated into services GVCs, especially for intraregional trade. For instance, the East Asia and Pacific region has backward and forward links totaling 31 percent of gross intraregional exports, but the Latin American and Caribbean total is only 16 percent (Borin and Mancini 2019). And that share has stagnated since the early 2000s, indicating inactivity in regional services GVCs.

The content of the region’s PTAs helps explain the scarcity of services trade, especially regionally, in its GVCs. Intraregional trade costs in Latin America and the Caribbean are higher than the region’s trade costs with North America—an unusual condition. The region’s PTAs with external partners tend to be more ambitious in content than those with regional partners, depending on the external partner. This configuration contributes to services trade patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, aligning with evidence that deeper services PTAs increase services trade by 15–65 percent and lead to more service value added being sourced from PTA partners (Borchert and Di Ubaldo 2021). The analysis reveals, besides the role of commitments to open services trade and related enforcement mechanisms, that provisions related to investment and the movement of people boost the role of services in GVC trade.

Latin American and Caribbean countries can use DTAs to increasingly liberalize service sector policies—for instance, by setting a horizontal standstill on discriminatory measures and quantitative restrictions. They should also consider a broader range of services trade modes, particularly foreign investment and movement of people, which are associated with higher value added in services exports.8 And PTAs can foster trade by including provisions to improve the transparency of measures that restrict trade in services and by strengthening data collection on services trade and policy.

Latin American and Caribbean countries use subsidies and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) intensively. Subsidies are often substantial, in the range of 4 percent of GDP in the region’s countries that report these data (in contrast, for instance, to an average of 1.4 percent in European Union countries).9 SOEs play a large role in many of the region’s countries, potentially affecting market competition as well as having potentially large fiscal implications in cases of weak performance due to soft budget constraints. Latin America and the Caribbean ranks below other regions in its intensity of domestic competition on the World Economic Forum’s composite measure (Schwab 2019).

DTAs can help overcome political economy constraints to policy reforms by providing an external anchor for frameworks of state support. Regulating or including provisions or commitments that regulate state support to enterprises in trade agreements can reduce national support policies’ harm to market competition and reduce adverse cross-border spillover effects. Agreements could include commitments to (a) adopt a competitive neutrality framework in national legislation; (b) adopt a regulation on competition, subsidies, and SOEs; (c) require SOEs to operate on a commercial and nondiscriminatory basis; and (d) expand the mandate of competition authorities to govern subsidies and SOEs.

DTAs can also improve the quality of institutions by requiring higher policy transparency, promoting evidence-based assessment of policy impact, and creating frameworks for public-private partnerships. Trade agreements can enhance policy