May 19, 2011
When the United States negotiates trade agreements with countries in Latin America, it likes to call them “free trade agreements.” Apparently this makes them more salable than simply calling them “trade agreements.”
These deals do not actually lead to free trade. They generally do almost nothing to remove the barriers that protect highly paid professionals, like doctors and lawyers, from foreign competition. More importantly they increase many protectionist barriers, like patent and copyright protection, which raises prices by several thousand percent above the free market price.
For this reason, in this article on relationships with Latin America, the NYT should either have simply called the agreements negotiated with Panama and Colombia “trade agreement” or used quotation marks in describing them as “free trade” agreements.
Comments