The U.S. has only two bilateral trade agreements in the region, with Singapore and Australia.
In the meantime, several members are pressing ahead with bilateral trade agreements that pre-empt and, in the eyes of some, undermine collective negotiations.
India, in addition to its free trade pact with ASEAN, has bilateral trade agreements with Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
In pitching the very same bilateral trade agreements two and three years ago that the business community is pitching today, then-USTR Susan Schwab liked to remind Congress that the United States had an aggregate trade surplus with the countries with whom the Bush administration had concluded free trade agreements, as though that were the appropriate success metric.
Although he has spoken in support of free trade in the past (and voted for NAFTA), his more recent record includes "no" votes on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and a number of bilateral free trade agreements.
With these two avenues closed, regional and bilateral free trade agreements are the best vehicles to liberalize commerce.
FORBES: To Expand Commerce And Grow The Economy, Trade Freely With Europe
The U.S. will continue to forge bilateral free trade agreements like the ones it has in place with Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Bahrain, Bush said, but social freedoms are just as important to prosperity as relaxing tariffs and courting investment.
Bilateral and regional trade agreements are already in favour with the Bush administration.
Accordingly, the Baltic States and reformist republics should be directly offered membership in international economic and financial organizations and bilateral trade and financial agreements with G-7 countries.
Bilateral free-trade agreements are springing up all over Asia.
WTO, but has also made it clear that it sees bilateral or regional free-trade agreements as a legitimate alternative.
The clean skies tax might even break the rules of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International aviation agreements, according to many nations in the group who are scrambling to find clauses in bilateral agreements and international trade laws that would force Europe to end the carbon tax.
In Washington, support is growing for rewarding countries supportive of America's military policies with bilateral trade deals instead of pursuing multilateral agreements.
We negotiated more than nine foreign-trade agreements and eight bilateral investment agreements.
Many countries still pursue bilateral and regional trade deals, even though these are clearly inferior to global agreements, often diverting more trade than they create.
The benefits of a multilateral trade deal are vastly superior to those of a patchwork of bilateral and regional agreements.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo's visit to China in April, his third since being elected in 1999, further solidified relations between the two countries with agreements signed in the areas of political cooperation, telecommunications, bilateral trade and two-way investment.
Next week the European Court is expected to issue a preliminary judgment stripping European Union member governments of the right to negotiate bilateral air-service agreements and handing the power instead to the European Commission, which handles other external trade issues.
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