Free trade area of the Americas: negotiators move toward agreement that will have benefits

Original publisher: [Washington, D.C.] : U.S. General Accounting Office, [2001] OCLC Number: (OCoLC)48587283 Subject: Free trade -- America. Excerpt: ... Executive Summary • Dispute settlement - Effective provisions for settling disputes will help ensure that the FTAA's commitments are met. Crafting these provisions will require members to balance a desire for a strong regional enforcement mechanism against national concerns about sovereignty. While negotiators agree on much of the broad framework of the dispute settlement process, they disagree over details such as how to handle compliance, whether to allow appeals, and the extent to which the process should be open to outside parties. FTAA negotiators also must determine the relationship between the FTAA's dispute settlement process and other international agreements. • Competition policy - Competition policy is a new area for most countries in the Western Hemisphere, as only 12 of the 34 participating countries currently have competition policy laws. While the 34 participants have agreed that members of the FTAA should implement measures that proscribe anticompetitive business conduct such as monopolistic behavior, they differ over the level of detail necessary to promote the effective development of competition policy laws and agencies at the national or subregional level. The participants also have not agreed on the type of dispute settlement mechanism that should be used to settle disputes over implementation of the competition policy chapter. FTAA participants have taken steps to incorporate into FTAA negotiations Ministers Take Steps to three crosscutting themes: smaller economies, electronic commerce, and Address Crosscutting civil society. These " non-negotiating " groups do not produce text for the Themes FTAA agreement. They serve as a forum for discussion and a source of information on issues that reflect challenges arising from the diversity of FTAA participants, the need to respond to emerging t...