![]() But MPs in the ruling Conservative Party love trade deals and are desperate to secure visible benefits from leaving the EU and to ensure that Britain has a degree of influence in the Indo-Pacific.Įqually important, the British precedent should help set high standards for the CPTPP itself. Joining would, it is estimated, boost the baseline level of British gdp by £1.8bn or 0.08%. For the British government, too, the political pull is stronger than the economic one. “It can show it doesn’t have to be just an Indo-Pacific agreement,” Ms Cutler says. This influence is invaluable at a time when the “multilateral system as a whole, the World Trade Organisation at its core, are under threat like never before,” argues Shiro Armstrong of the Australian National University in Canberra.īritain’s accession will expand the deal’s reach. America’s revised free-trade deal with Mexico and Canada, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), lifted sections on digital commerce from the CPTPP. “These rules are living beyond the corners of CPTPP,” says Wendy Cutler, a former American official who negotiated the TPP. Its provisions on digital governance, customs procedures and intellectual-property protection have become reference points for deals elsewhere. If its economic punch has been subdued, the CPTPP has had much more impact on global trade rules. Encompassing some 40% of global GDP, the TPP was sold in America as offering open markets and enforcing high standards to counter China’s growing unruliness. The monster free-trade pact taking shape became the economic centrepiece of Barack Obama’s much-touted “pivot” to Asia. ![]() ![]() Australia, Peru and Vietnam joined the talks that ensued, followed by Canada, Malaysia, Mexico and, in 2013, Japan. A big step towards that vision came in 2005 when an agreement between four small economies-Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore-caught America’s eye. The leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation, or APEC, grouping gathered at a beach resort in Bogor, Indonesia in 1994, and, clad in intricately patterned Javanese shirts, pledged to pursue “free and open trade and investment” in the region by 2020. The CPTPP originated in the halcyon days of the 1990s, when great-power competition was over, America was ascendant and globalisation in vogue. “Just as the mettle of the TPP project has been tested by the United States, now it will be tested by China,” says Mireya Solís of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington. The group’s handling of those duelling bids will have big implications for the balance of power in Asia, as well as the future of what’s left of the liberal international trading system. That will put the spotlight on applications from China and Taiwan, which were submitted in late 2021. The pact may soon have its first new member: Britain is expected to reach an “agreement in principle” to join as early as this week. Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand have all expressed interest in joining. Even so, other countries, including America’s greatest rival, are clamouring to join the deal.
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