The Western Hemisphere covers over 34 countries, each with different factor endowments and development histories, and linked by a complex “spaghetti bowl” of regional integration projects and bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements. Making sense of any one part of these is challenging, but the Integration and Trade Sector’s INTrade system offers information that can help users quickly get a handle on the trade patterns and policies in countries of the region.
To begin, the Country Profile tool gives a comprehensive overview of each country’s main trading partners and export products, their evolution over the past 20 years, degree of trade diversification, and their trade agreements, among others. The Profile includes many tables and interactive graphs that give a picture of what types of goods the selected country sends to each of its main export destinations. Other graphs break down exports by economic sector and by technological content.
For up-to-date information of export growth, the Trade Trend Estimates tool pulls data from the most recent edition of that semiannual publication and presents them in an easy-to-digest format.
One option gives a regional outlook that compares the latest figures for total export growth across countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
A second option permits a more detailed, bilateral analysis of exports from each country of the region. Select a country (or the regional total) and the map will indicate the level of growth of exports to each regional partner plus the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. Again, the data is exportable to Excel, including levels in U.S. dollars, the growth rate, the share of exports, and the contribution to overall export growth in the period.
For more detail at the product level, the Bilateral Trade tool gives quick visual access to imports and exports of over five thousand products over twenty years for the countries of the region.
This tool provides a map that highlights the intensity of trade with each potential partner country in the world, and the product selection can drill down to the subheading level of the Harmonized System. In addition to a visual map, the data can be viewed in a tabular layout, and exported to Excel.
To get a view of the complex network of trade agreements in force in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Trade and Integration Agreements tool maps out the agreements for each country. This tool allows a broad view of the region and lets you drill down to any individual country and agreement, linking to the database of agreements and detailed profiles highlighting intra-agreement trade flows, and providing access to the official documents of the agreements.
Lastly, the tool for analyzing Tariff Reduction Schedules offers a deep comparative analysis of the detailed annexes in regional trade agreements that define the process for elimination of tariffs on goods originating in each agreement.
You can compare the time paths of tariff reduction across sectors within an agreement to see how quickly, for instance, footwear tariffs decline compared to autos, or for a given sector in different agreements of a chosen country, for example how fast the U.S. reduces tariffs on footwear from the Dominican Republic vs. Australia vs. Korea.
INTrade offers numerous other databases and tools to help users analyze and understand regional trade and trade policy, and to facilitate the efforts of companies seeking to take advantage of the opportunities that regional trade agreements offer. Different databases cover rules of origin, detailed preferential and non-preferential (MFN) tariffs, tariff rate quotas and their fill rates, and more.
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