Negotiating Market Access Between The European Union And Mercosur

The slow pace of the Doha Round has boosted the proliferation of regional and bilateral trade agreements. Paradoxically, the more powerful actors, the US and the European Union, who at the same time have benefited the most from the multilateral system, have also been engaged in bilateral and regional negotiations in order to sign WTO-plus agreements with developing countries. Combining a clear theoretical exposition with systematic cross-regional analysis, 'Asymmetric Trade Negotiations' offers a coherent picture of strategic, design and political economy aspects of North-South trade negotiation processes, from African, Asian and Latin American perspectives. Skilled area specialists gather to provide negotiators and policy makers in the South with recommendations, best practices, and benchmarks and contribute to the understanding of these recent processes.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Business economics - Trade and Distribution, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Applied Sciences Mainz (-), course: European Integration, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: During the last two decades, regional trading blocs and intra-regional trade have been gradually built up. Moves towards a liberalisation of international trade have led to the formation of large and increasingly regional trading blocks. Advantages deriving from international trade include political stability and overall growth. The three largest and best-established trading regions worldwide are NAFTA, EU and Asia-Pacific (ASEAN and APEC). Without being a member or contracting party, the European Union already participated in trade negotiations of GATT, OECD and UN and has also favoured Mercosur's process of regional integration from its very conception in 1991. Today Mercosur is the world's fourth largest single market, after the EU, the USA and Japan. Mercosur's aim to become a real common market forms the main element in the creation of an association between both regions. This book mainly concentrates on the bilateral negotiations on trade issues between the European Union and Mercosur.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book provides a distinctive and empirically rich account of the European Union’s relationship with the Common Market of the South (Mercosur). It seeks to examine the motivations that determine the EU’s policy towards Mercosur; the most important relationship the EU has with another regional economic integration organization. In order to investigate these motivations (or lack thereof), this study examines the contribution of the main policy- and decision-makers, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, as well as the different contributions of the two institutions. It analyses the development of EU policy towards Mercosur in relation to three key stages. Arana argues that the dominant explanations in the literature fail to adequately explain the EU’s policy, in particular, these accounts tend to infer the EU’s motives from its activity. Rather than the EU pursuing a strategy, as implied by most of the existing literature, the EU was largely responsive, which explains why the relationship is much less developed than the EU’s relations with other parts of the world.

Despite a stop-and-go policy, over the past twenty years the European Union, Latin America, and the Caribbean Region have joined forces to scale-up their partnership. Today, the time seems ripe for the EU to give new impetus to bi-regional relations as the US interest in the region appears to be decreasing, and China quickly steps in. The near future will indicate whether the political will to bolster relations between the EU and the region is actually stronger than before: how will the agreements between the EU and Mexico, Chile, and the Caribbean be updated? Will the EU-MERCOSUR Association Agreement be completed?If so, the EU will be able to enact free trade agreements with all the countries in the region, except Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. The latter is already involved in its first ever negotiation with the EU to strengthen bilateral cooperation. This volume provides an overview and wide-ranging analyses on the ongoing negotiations, viable options and possible results.

We estimate that a hard Brexit would reduce UK agro industrial imports from the EU by 50%. The UK Government has proposed to substitute the Common Agricultural Policy with market-oriented policies. It has also expressed interest in signing free trade agreements with interested countries and is already moving in this direction. Assuming Mercosur considers this option, then it would face two negotiations in Europe: with the EU and with the UK. How should it allocate its scarce negotiating resources and where should its political capital be put in the near future? For a number of reasons discussed in the text we argue that: i) negotiations with the EU are unlikely to deliver market access much in excess of what it has offered so far; ii) unlike these negotiations that have dragged for around twenty years, there are circumstances indicating that an FTA with the UK could be completed in a relatively short period and, iii) failing Mercosur to give these talks priority, other countries are more than likely to fill the UK import gap triggered by Brexit. We offer back-of-the-envelope estimates indicating that under such an FTA, Mercosur could triple its meat exports and double its agro-industrial exports to the UK.