While the United States and many other countries flirt with the idea of raising barriers to trade, our enlightened neighbor to the south has a more promising response to the global economic contraction.

On January 2, the Calderon administration initiated a plan (discussed here; HT to Scott Lincicome) to unilaterally reduce tariff rates on about 70 percent of the items on its tariff schedule. Those 8,000 items comprising 20 different industrial sectors accounted for about half of all Mexican import value in 2007. When the final phase of the plan is implemented on January 1, 2013, the average industrial tariff rate in Mexico will have fallen from 10.4% to 4.3%.

The objectives of the plan are to reduce business operating costs, attract and retain foreign investment, raise business productivity, and provide consumers a greater variety and better quality of goods and services at competitive prices. Perhaps our free trade advocacy is having a positive impact on public policy after all. I suspect those objectives are very well served by the plan.

Mexico is no stranger to unilateral trade liberalization—so they’re not just grasping at straws here. This is a tried and true approach to economic growth in Mexico and throughout the world. Many of the reforms Mexico agreed to in the North American Free Trade Agreement were already undertaken before the NAFTA went into effect in 1994. They were undertaken with the same objectives in mind. So, Mexico has some experience and credibility on the issue of the benefits of unilateral trade liberalization.

Let’s hope the rest of the world is watching, if not waiting in the wings.