U.S. Chamber Urges Greater Support for Trade Reforms in Advance of the Summit of the Americas
What governments can do to create jobs, fight poverty, and enhance the competitiveness of the Americas
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The IV Summit of the Americas comes at a perplexing moment for the hemisphere. As one version of the draft summit declaration observes, quite rightly, "many of our countries have [recently] experienced periods of high growth, coexisting with weak employment generation, marked concentration of income, and significant increases in poverty and extreme poverty indices." Simply put, the promise of our day is not being realized.
In this light, the overarching themes of the summit have been chosen well. Job creation. Poverty reduction. Competitiveness in the global marketplace. For the hemisphere's business community, the challenge is to address the most pressing needs first. We must identify the steps national governments can take, individually or jointly, to facilitate job creation, combat poverty, and enhance our competitiveness — and begin today. We in the private sector stand ready to do our part, as we will explain below.
To this end, we respectfully offer the following recommendations to the governments assembling at the IV Summit of the Americas. We believe these "Three Simple Things" — if put into general practice — would do much to dispel the malaise that grips the Americas. The scope of the paper is limited in the interest of making a few salient points, but this should not be interpreted as a lack of commitment to, for instance, education reform or the fight against counterfeiting and piracy.
The issues we address in this paper may not be at the top of the agenda for the official summit. But if we are serious about creating jobs, fighting poverty, and becoming more competitive, we believe they should be.