Canadian foreign policy in the Americas

This can be measured in many ways, such as the magnitude of China’s exports of manufactured goods (8 percent of world exports in 2006), its ranking as the third exporter in world merchandise trade and the fourth in commercial services exports, the scale of its imports of primary commodities, or the past and projected growth of its GDP. [...] The “slicing-up” of the value chains and the geographical dispersion of production, facilitated by the decline of trade barriers and cheaper transportation and communications, is also transforming the patterns of production and trade observed in the global economy. [...] In order to have a real understanding of the policy options available to Canadian policy makers to build strong economies in the region, we need a detailed appreciation of how the structural changes in the global economy are affecting Latin America. [...] Whether it is the impact of China and India on labour-intensive production in Mexico and Central America, or on the demand for primary products from resource-rich countries in South America, the critical issue is that the way a country integrates into the global economy, or its mode of insertion, affects its development and its capacity to reduce poverty. [...] To understand the nature of the competition, we have to disaggregate some of the information about the composition of these exports.