El ATC: desvío de comercio en el sector textiles y vestimenta de América Latina

The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) at the WTO deals with the progressive opening of the markets in high-income countries favoring leading exporters from the developing countries. This process is to be finished by the year 2005 when the whole sector is going to be under the WTO rules, and will occur in four steps, but only at the end the major part of the products will be included. In fact, the scope of the liberalization actually implemented up to now has been limited because the countries have committed in products non-restricted, with scarce value added or with high tariff protection, also they have adopted temporal safeguards, antidumping actions or other restrictions. During the same period the Latin American countries have liberalized their economies followed by a significant increase of their imports. The paper aims to disentangle the effect on Latin American of the delay in the opening of the big importer markets. Specifically, it questions in what extend the increase in the Latin American imports has exposed the local producers to harder competition from foreign products than it would be the case if the liberalization would be at the same time by both sides. The paper explore the evolution of the Latin American import flows in textiles and clothing during the nineties and, using the GTAP, simulate the effects from the elimination of trade barriers on Latin American countries in two relevant scenarios.