The Eurasian Economic Union & Latin America and the Caribbean: A Transcontinental Partnership
Inside the LAC region, some countries are not members of any of these groups: Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic,12 Mexico and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. While these have not fully integrated with any such collective integration group, they are part of other trade agreements among LAC countries. The Eurasian Economic Union is a more recent economic process than those mentioned above. As described earlier, it went through several iterations, but EAEU was eventually founded with its current membership in 2015. Among those integration processes, CACM has the highest share of intraregional trade. It steadily increased over the last 58 years and in 2018, the intraregional exports reached 31% of total exports (excluding free zones exports). Though this percentage seems small when compared to integration groups like the European Union, with an intraregional export share above 60%, it offers an opportunity to expand the production of high value-added goods. This experience was the case for CACM and MERCOSUR countries, in which more than half of their intraregional exports are manufactured with some grade of technology incorporated. For CAN, CARICOM and EAEU, the percentage of products rather than primary and NBRM in intraregional exports constitute correspondingly 39%, 19% and 45%. Table II.2 looks at a selected number of countries and their primary export markets. The high level of dependence for Central American countries on CACM is immediately clear. The other noteworthy observation is that Mexico, despite its size does not play an important role as an export destination for most countries, due to its deep trade integration with the North American market. Table II.2 Selected Latin America and the Caribbean countries: intraregional exports, circa 2019 (Percentages) Exporters
Brazil
Caribbean
Central America
Mexico
South America
Argentina
50
3
3
3
42
Belize Bolivia (Plur. State of) Brazil
0
81
14
1
4
39
1
0
0
59
0
4
7
13
75
Chile
30
3
6
13
49
Colombia
12
14
26
11
38
Costa Rica
1
14
71
9
6
El Salvador
0
5
89
5
1
Guatemala
1
6
76
11
6
Jamaica
1
74
5
1
19
Mexico
20
6
32
0
42
Paraguay
46
0
1
0
52
Peru
26
3
8
7
57
Uruguay
48
4
2
8
38
Source: Prepared by the authors, on the basis of United Nations Commodity Trade Database (UN Comtrade Database) [online database] https://comtrade.un.org/. Note: Green and dark green cells indicate intraregional export shares of more than 30%. Yellow cells point out intraregional exports between 1% and 30% share. Red cells imply intraregional exports of less than 1%. 12
The Dominican Republic is member of the Central American Integration System since 2013, though not of its Common Market.
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