Call to think big on trade
Over roughly the last three decades the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region has been laboriously building up a patchwork of free trade agreements and sub-regional trade blocs. A new report from the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), Connecting the dots: A road map for a better integration of Latin America an d the Caribbean , suggests there is a lot more to be done to reap the potential benefits offered by regional integration. In fact, if the existing 33 separate agreements were to be blended into a single trading bloc, the report suggests that US$11bn in additional trade could be generated.