Modern Economy, 2014, 5, 614-624 Published Online May 2014 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/me http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/me.2014.55058 How to cite this paper: de Gouvea, R., et al. (2014) An Export Portfolio Assessment of Regional Free Trade Agreements: A Mercosur and Pacific Alliance Perspective. Modern Economy, 5, 614-624. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/me.2014.55058 An Export Portfolio Assessment of Regional Free Trade Agreements: A Mercosur and Pacific Alliance Perspective Raul de Gouvea 1 , Dimitri Kapelianis 2 , Manuel-Julian R. Montoya 1 , Gautam Vora 1 1 Department of FIT Management, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA 2 Department of MIDS, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA Email: rauldg@unm.edu , dkapeli@unm.edu , mrmonto@unm.edu , vora@unm.edu Received 25 February 2014; revised 18 April 2014; accepted 30 April 2014 Copyright © 2014 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract We use the portfolio theory to assess the export performance of two important regional free trade agreements (RFTAs), namely, Mercosur and the Pacific Alliance, and their constituent countries. The results indicate that the export portfolio of the Pacific Alliance dominates that of Mercosur from a risk-return perspective. When we compare these two regional FTAs’ portfolios to an Asian export portfolio, the performance of the export portfolios of the Latin American RFTAs is domi- nated by that of the Asian export portfolio. In a larger context, the continual attention paid to these Latin American RFTAs is a reflection of the slow and uneven development of global trade negotiation. Keywords Export Performance, Free Trade Area, Regional Free Trade Area, Single Index Model, Sharpe Measure 1. Introduction The past decades have seen the expansion of bilateral free trade agreements (BFTAs) and regional free trade agreements (RFTAs) across the globe. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment negotiated the Havana Charter of the then-defunct International Trade Organization (ITO) which was not ratified by the US and whose principles later became part of the charter in 1947 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The purpose of GATT was reducing tariffs and various trade barriers and the elimination of preferen-