The Pacific Alliance: Regional Driving Force for Prosperity and Growth

This is a trade protocol supplementary to the Pacific Alliance Framework Agreement, which also sets forth that the remaining 8% will be gradually freed from taxes.

One of the main achievements included in the official agreement is the chance to accumulate the origins of goods to foster production integration, rounding off exports to ship value-added products towards Asia.

For Colombia in particular, it is expected that this integration approach will yield an additional growth of 0.7% for the GDP, as well as a foreign investment increase of 1.4% and more than 40,000 new jobs, according to a survey by the National Planning Agency of Colombia.

During the meeting between Sebastian Piñera, president of Chile, Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, Ollanta Humala, president of Peru, and Enrique Peña Nieto, president of Mexico, Finland, India, Israel, Morocco, and Singapore joined the Pacific Alliance as observer countries. These five new countries join a total of 30 nations that follow this integration process very closely, which is now regarded as an international role model.

Also during this Summit, the Pacific Alliance Business Council presented nation leaders with 10 items the private sector demands governments to discuss and include as part of the Pacific Alliance agenda: tax rules validation, financial integration, public purchases, entrepreneurship and innovation, education collaboration, technical standard harmonization, and regulatory convergence for the cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food sectors, as well as sanitary certificates through the Pan American Health Organization, International Trade One-Stop Window, production integration, and competitive logistics.

The Pacific Alliance share of the total GDP in Latin America and the Caribbean is 36%; its growth rate in 2012 was 5%, with a share of foreign trade in the region of 50% in the same year, which in the last three years has amounted to nearly 41% of the total flow of Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.