Regional Integration and the Opportunities Offered by Global Value Chains: the Case of the Pacific Alliance

Disruptions in the global value chains (GVCs) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and other events that had impacted geopolitical dynamics since 2018 fueled expectations worldwide to reorganize the GVCs. Historically, Latin American countries have been characterized by a lower participation in the GVCs compared with European and Southeast Asian countries. In 2014 the four members of the Pacific Alliance (PA), Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, signed a trade protocol in which origin cumulation was included with the objective of boosting configuration of a regional value chain (RVC) that would take advantage, initially, of the different trade agreements subscribed by each country with Asia Pacific countries. However, the intra PA trade has not increased—it was 2.48% in 2022. This study seeks to determine the PA potential and readiness to take advantage of the recent reorganization of GVCs and presents an exercise that identifies potential export products from the bloc to the U.S. market, using Mexico as an export platform.