Fta Between Colombia And Usa

FTA BETWEEN COLOMBIA AND USA, A GOOD ALTERNATIVE TO OPEN OUR COUNTRY TO AN INTERNATIONAL MARKET.
Many people think that the Free trade agreement between Colombia and United States is not a good option to our producers because we are not ready to open our market, but we are in a globalized world and if Colombia hadn´t approved this agreement, we would have been producing in the same way withoutthinking to improve our methods and how to be more competitive. This agreement was negotiated in 2006 and on May of this year, the agreement came into force. An FTA “is a trade agreement between certain countries granting their members an exclusive favor and is a common type of regional trade agreements.” This sort of agreement is very important for countries to attract foreign investment and toimprove the economic growth. Even though it is not easy for developing countries as Colombia, these regional trade agreements are expanding now a days, and they have more advantages than disadvantages for this countries.
Advantages that allow Colombia to grow
In the first place, An FTA does not required constant changes, which makes it a stable and predictable instrument with clear rules toboth countries involved in the agreement. As well as this, when Colombia accepted this negotiation, a lot of studies about positive changes because of the agreement were made, and the results were a possible economic growth, increasing exports and creation of both qualified and no qualified employment. In fact, 4 years later “Colombia is a more competitive country, which is open to the world, witha mature productive sector and with better conditions to attract investment and to capture international markets.” What is more, The United States is the main place where our exports are going to, having a 42% of participation of the total of it, all of this doing without any agreement.
Another important advantage is for the agricultural sector, in the way that this sector will have no tariffs,besides United States will help our country providing technology to improve our methods and to have better goods quality to access to that market.
Then there is a very important advantage for the industrial sector; it will have an important competitive edge because it will be a market without tariffs for 99% of the products we export to that country, which is a good option for our country to sellthat goods and look for other markets with a good quality of products. Moreover, the 82% of the imported goods from USA will have no tariffs as well, but it is important to say that these products are not being produced in Colombia.
And last but not least, an important point is that producers and the Colombian industry are not the only favored with this agreement, the consumers in our country“will have a lot of choices in characteristics such as quality and prices, increasing Colombians purchasing power.”
We have to invest in the future
First of all, it is important to say that this FTA is very important to Colombia because, by the end of this year, we will have opened the biggest market around the world of goods and services as is United States, which “has a population of more than 308million and with an annual Per capita income of US $ 47.400 dollar.” As well as this, with this FTA, Colombia will be forced to improve its products and services quality, turning out goods with international standards.
In other words, as this is an agreement made between a developed country and a developing country, Colombia has to make an effort to be as competitive as United States, and thecommerce, industry and tourism department with the support of the National Government ; has been working on a initiative which is called “ Programa de transformación productiva”. This initiative was created to develop global sectors, helping them with business plans in order to have a stronger national production processing and to improve the economic growth. The sectors which are being helped...