Ministers
from the 12 nations involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free
trade talks wrapped up their four-day meeting here last Tuesday without a
full agreement, thus failed to cut a deal by the end of this year as
Washington had expected.A few days earlier, the 159-member WTO reached
an agreement in the Doha round of its multilateral trade negotiations at
its ninth ministerial meeting in Bali, Indonesia. The breakthrough
came, however, after many missed deadlines in more than a decade of
negotiations.The two meetings, though with different agenda and outcome,
underlined nevertheless the complexity and difficulties for global
trade rule setting.pendant lampThe
Bali accord served to offer some confidence to the world trade body,
especially at a time when many countries are seeking regional trade
agreements outside the WTO framework such as the TPP and Transattlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership(TTIP).
Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, Asian economies, ASEAN nations in particular, have
embarked on a combination of multilateral and unilateral measures to
reduce barriers to trade goods, services and investments. Since 2000,
however,Meinys has a knife drop ship program for knives wholesaler customers
throughout the United States. a lack of progress in multilateral
liberalization, and domestic reform has led to a proliferation of ASEAN
free trade areas (FTAs).But according to a report by the Asia
Development Bank,"while these agreements commit the parties to
eliminating tariffs on trade between themselves, they do not effectively
address regulatory barriers and other non-tariff barriers like product
standards and mutual recognition agreements, services, investment,
intellectual property rights, government procurement or the movement of
business people -- which are all more important than tariffs for
regional economic integration." That's probably part of the reason why
four ASEAN members -- Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam --have
decided to join the TPP that also involves Australia, Canada, Chile,
Japan, Mexico,polyester resin New
Zealand, the United States and Peru.The TPP has been envisioned as "a
high-standard, comprehensive and forward-looking trade agreement that
aims to address the challenges of the modern economy."Termed as "the
agreement of the 21st century" by its proponents, the TPP is very
ambitious. When negotiations have concluded, it could potentially create
a free-trade bloc that will comprise some 40 percent of the global
economy, according to leading economists.
No comments:
Post a Comment