The Permanent Secretariat of SELA has been working on the promotion of research to expand the wide range of knowledge available about intra- and extra-regional trade, economic and cooperation relations among Latin American and Caribbean countries.

The Work Programme for the year 2017 includes a regional meeting that aims to identify and disseminate the optimal strategies to follow, with a view to improving trade promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises in the region, and to boost cooperation among both public and private stakeholders to establish alliances that foster the inclusion of these companies in new markets and ultimately ensure their productive articulation at higher levels of value chains.

In this context, this Meeting will be divided into two parts. The first will include a presentation of the statistical database being prepared by the Permanent Secretariat as a contribution to the database of indicators describing the business outlook, as well as the efforts being made by the member countries of the Pacific Alliance and MERCOSUR. The second part will assess the comparative and competitive advantages of enterprises with the aim of identifying complementarities in production that contribute to the establishment of strategic alliances that boost trade promotion of SMEs at the regional level.