The countries of the Americas are all facing difficulties. The current financial crisis, which began in Thailand and Indonesia and has traveled around the world, is having a very real impact on the daily lives of people everywhere. The UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean has announced that GDP growth in Latin America has diminished by 1 percent over the past year. No country, as WTO Director General Renato Ruggiero recently emphasized, has an interest in building walls against productive investment flows from outside. Trade, investment and technology are interlinked and inseparable in today's world.
Protectionism is, as has been seen in the past, a self-defeating strategy.
Even worse, it can be contagious. Maintaining a free flow of goods and investment is the best way to ensure an early recovery. Recently, we have seen in our own Hemisphere an example of a county facing a financial crisis that did not have to turn inward. While remarkable, these trends are not new. The early twentieth century world was also one of rising innovations and falling barriers to trade and capital, with railroads and steamships driving goods through barrier-free borders.