Joint Declaration on The Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity

1. We, the governments of Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay, share geographies, languages, history, culture, and familial ties, in addition to our long-standing economic ties. As democracies, we are united by a common purpose to respond to the needs of our peoples through good governance that leads to robust economic opportunities and sustainable, inclusive economic growth. As neighbors, we stand to reap the benefits of an open, fair, inclusive, and prosperous hemisphere.
    
2. We acknowledge that the well-being and sustainable economic security of our peoples are linked, and that recovering economically from the Covid-19 pandemic and global inflationary pressures and achieving sustainable growth require stronger regional partnership. In this spirit, we announce our shared intention to establish the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. Today, we launch discussions to orient our future negotiations on key issues to deepen our economic cooperation and strengthen our collective stability and resilience.
    
3. Together, we intend to accelerate the region’s economic growth in the service of eliminating poverty, reducing inequality, and ensuring that the benefits of this growth are broadly distributed. We seek to cooperate on innovative solutions for public administration to improve access to and delivery of public services and support the mobilization of domestic resources. We support stronger governance and adherence to the rule of law, driven by principles of transparency and accountability. We recognize that fairness and competition in open markets are vital to the vibrancy of our democratic institutions, and we plan to work together with the private sector and civil society in the fight against corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, and other illicit financial flows, in line with our existing multilateral obligations. We intend for our economic cooperation to include concerted efforts to promote gender equality, women’s workforce participation, and women’s empowerment. We are committed to pursuing an inclusive, human rights-based approach to economic policy that leaves no one behind, including but not limited to members of historically underrepresented and vulnerable groups such as Indigenous Peoples, Afro- descendants, women, youth, LGBTQI+ individuals, older persons, persons with disabilities, and members of rural populations. We also seek to promote the transition to formal employment, invest in education and workforce development, advance workers’ rights, and encourage responsible business conduct in our effort to promote economic growth that can benefit everyone.
    
4. To bolster our regional competitiveness and resilience, we seek to strengthen the diversity, sustainability, and resilience of our supply chains by expanding regional trade ties, and to advance quality infrastructure. Working with our stakeholders, we intend to explore opportunities for technical assistance and to exchange information and best practices to improve our coordination of crisis response measures and prevent disruptions in key regional supply chains. We aim to strengthen capacities to promote and enforce strong environmental protections and labor standards, including the eradication of forced labor, at every step along our regional value chains. This work will include efforts to address the climate crisis, food security challenges, and vulnerabilities in global supply chains.
    
5. In line with our collective efforts to combat the climate crisis, we intend to seek opportunities to address climate change through mitigation, adaptation, and resilience, as well as through clean and renewable energy and energy efficiency. Such actions would support our mutual energy security objectives of ensuring sufficient and reliable access to affordable and sustainable energy in all communities. We aim to find ways to improve our respective levels of environmental protections with the goal of addressing biodiversity loss, preventing wildlife trafficking and other illegal activity, and conserving our natural resources for generations to come. We intend to work with civil society, public and private actors, and regional and multilateral financial institutions to explore ways to leverage resources and other necessary instruments to create decent jobs, facilitate a just and sustainable clean energy transition, and increase opportunities for the most vulnerable communities.
    
6. Our longstanding trade and commercial relationships will serve as the foundation for our efforts to expand the benefits of sustainable, inclusive, and responsible trade to all. Along these lines, we intend to promote greater economic integration in the region and seek to increase collaboration on customs, trade facilitation, logistics, and good regulatory practices; address non-tariff barriers; and promote sustainable quality investment. We intend to promote trade that advances workers’ rights and economic security and elevates the role of the self-employed, entrepreneurs, and micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises to support supply chain diversification. We seek to build an environment of trust and confidence in the digital economy, and to advance secure and resilient digital infrastructure and platforms. We also intend to foster an inclusive digital economy by taking concerted steps to close the digital divide, promote digital-enabling skills, and leverage digital tools, digital literacy, and technology to meet our goals.
    
7. Generating broadly shared prosperity hinges on our ability to mobilize greater public and private investment that increases the well-being of our peoples, including through improvements in education, nutrition and health, social safeguards, and public infrastructure. We seek to reinvigorate regional economic and financial institutions and partner on forward-thinking reforms in multilateral finance and lending institutions. We aim to leverage opportunities for co-investment in the region with allies and partners from outside of our hemisphere and to strengthen connections and business ties among diaspora entrepreneurs in the Americas and the Caribbean. This will help to encourage private sector investment that meets environment, social, and governance criteria, while promoting financial inclusion, creating decent jobs, and improving the livelihoods of individuals from all backgrounds, including those in underserved communities.
    
8. The Americas Partnership will drive our deepened economic cooperation and foster bold ideas with clear actions for advancing our vision of development, democracy, and shared prosperity. We intend for the Partnership to be an open and inclusive initiative and to expand in the future to other partners in the hemisphere that share our vision, goals, and commitment to an ambitious agenda of sustainable economic growth and hemispheric resilience.

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