The open Atlantic Prosperity Area proposed in this study would remove the current obstacles to transatlantic trade and investment to give a boost to wealth creation for the whole of humanity.

This Atlantic Prosperity Area is not designed as a free trade area but intended as a WTO-plus agreement to serve as a building block for wider world free trade. Barriers to trade and investment between the European Union and the United States of America, such as government procurement discrimination, antidumping policies, safeguard provisions, public subsidies, differing standards, protectionist consumer and environmental regulation and discriminatory judicial decisions would be brought down, leading to full Atlantic economic integration.

The Atlantic Prosperity Area must be an open club. A novel application of the Most Favoured Nation clause translates into open access to any third country wanting to join, if ready and willing to fulfil the conditions accepted by the Atlantic partners, thus resulting in a super-Doha offer to the rest of the world. Members of NAFTA, members of the European Economic Space and many other Latin American nations, which share democracy and common values with the EU and the US, would be natural partners of the Atlantic Prosperity Area.

Special care would be taken to give this Atlantic Prosperity Area a multilateral dimension by fusing US and UE programs for LDCs into a single Multilateral Development Agenda and implementing more effective development policies, especially through increased international trade. The Atlantic Prosperity Area

would thus provide a new impulse to the fight against poverty. 

The Atlantic Prosperity Area would deliver substantial and permanent welfare gains to both EU and US citizens as well as to the rest of the world, even before any other nation joined. Higher growth and more and better jobs would be generated, especially in Europe, where economic stimulus and new dynamism is much needed.

This study has been supported by Fundación FAES, a Spanish think tank working in favour of free markets and individual freedom. Fundación FAES  is chaired by José María Aznar, President of the Government of Spain in 1996-2004.