Trade Liberalization
The Washington Consensus, as framed by Williamson, envisaged a largely unilateral process of trade reform, by which countries would lower their non-tariff (especially) and tariff barriers to imports. Many countries, including the majority of those in Latin America, have indeed undertaken significant unilateral trade liberalization over subsequent years, opening their economies to greater import competition while simultaneously increasing the share of exports in their GDP (in parallel, Latin America's share in global trade has also increased).
A separate agenda—only tangentially related to the Washington Consensus as framed by Williamson—concerns various programs for multilateral trade liberalization, whether at the global (WTO) or regional level, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and DR-CAFTA agreements.
Read more about this topic: Washington Consensus
Famous quotes containing the word trade:
“Is there something in trade that dessicates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self- seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation.... Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)