What are the main issues in Chile's trade agenda? This paper argues that the country's agenda does not lend itself to that traditional kind of policy advice usually given throughout Latin America. Protection is low and uniform, institutions that govern trade policy are strong and well protected from capture and the country has put a lot of effort in opening markets in the region and abroad. The important issues that come out of the analysis are to a great extent, "second generational". That is: export diversification, the regional distribution of trade gains, completion of the "multidimensional" trade strategy and transport costs. Whereas Chile has made progress in diversifying its exports away from copper, concentration is still high even when compared to other resource intensive countries. On the regional issue, it seems clear that Chile's export-led growth in the last two decades was not evenly distributed across the regions. On Chile's "multidimensional" trade strategy, Asia is clearly the missing link in the country's wide net of preferential agreements and the evidence available suggest that transport costs are these days a more important obstacle to Chile's trade than traditional trade barriers.

Economic and political integration have been a perennial and neuralgic issue in the Caribbean agenda. This paper draws on the literature on trade, growth and regional agreements to discuss the motivation behind the Caribbean drive for integration, the results obtained so far and what is in stock for the future. It argues, with the help of descriptive statistics, an empirical growth model and a gravity model, that the traditional, trade related gains from regional integration have been and are bound to be limited because of (i) the countries' high openness; (ii) the limited size of the common, enlarged market; and (iii) the countries' relatively similar factor endowments. It also argues, though, that gains in the area of non-tradables, due to economies of scale which cannot be mitigated by trade and openness, can be substantial.

In this paper, we present evidence indicating that international migrant remittances lead to improved developmental outcomes. Using a cross-section of all Mexican municipalities (over 2400) in the year 2000, we show that an increase in the fraction of households receiving international remittances is correlated with better schooling and health indicators and with reductions in poverty, even after controlling for the likely endogeneity between remittances and developmental outcome variables. Our findings have important policy implications as they suggest that national governments and the international community should adopt measures that facilitate remittance flows.