OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría said he was convinced that negotiations for a free trade agreement were moving forward and that Europeans wanted a compromise to be reached, even though there were differences on some points that required time for negotiations.
These negotiations "They are moving forward and I think it is inevitable., Gurría said in statements to the press at the eleventh edition of the International Economic Forum on Latin America and the Caribbean organized in Paris by the French Government, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Gurría not only denied that France has a veto attitude towards this agreement – even though he acknowledged that there are a number of discrepancies with some countries or with certain products – but that «is totally in favor«.
"I think the Europeans want an agreement with Mercosur," he said, but there are "different trade cultures" in both blocs.
According to the Mexican, there is no need to rush because the issues under discussion "are too important to be urgent«.
As for the fact that Europeans want to demand reciprocity in establishing new free trade agreements, in order to require that products entering their space comply with environmental or social standards, he said that "that is the irreversible path" Y "a "good idea" towards which all countries are moving.
Gurría, without ever directly criticizing the United States for its threat to raise tariffs, was at pains to underline the negative effects this is having on the global economy.
The damages, he admitted, are less in the United States because "It is the most self-sufficient country in the world"much less dependent on the foreign sector than open countries such as Germany, Italy or Japan.
In the OECD's semi-annual Outlook report published last Tuesday, the United States is one of the few countries whose economic forecasts for 2019 and 2020 have been revised upwards, when in the vast majority of cases they have been revised downwards.
One of the reasons given by Gurría is the fiscal stimulus decided by the Donald Trump administration, even at the risk of raising the deficit to 5% of GDP, which much more than in other countries has an effect on the growth of domestic activity, rather than on the expansion of demand for imports.
Source: Reuters
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