The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPP) was first initiated by Chile, Singapore, New Zealand and Brunei in 2005. Its most important feature is the mutual cancellation of tariffs. Due to the small economic scale of the original participating countries, the agreement received little attention at first. In 2008, the United States announced its accession and proposed to create a high-standard and broader regional cooperation agreement. Since then, the popularity has gradually increased. Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Japan and other countries joined in the following years.
There are 12 countries that have reached TPP agreements: the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Mexico and Peru, accounting for 40% of the global economy.
TPP agreement contains a large number of legal provisions, including 30 chapters on investment, services, e-commerce, government procurement, intellectual property rights, labor and environment, among which market access for agricultural products, rules of origin for automobile industry and intellectual property protection for pharmaceutical industry are the main focuses of previous rounds of negotiations. After a fierce game, the parties finally reached a compromise and successfully concluded the TPP negotiations. According to the agreement, the tariffs of about 6.5438+0.8 million kinds of goods between relevant countries will be gradually reduced or completely cancelled in the future.
TPP agreement may cause new imbalance and uncertainty.
Compared with some existing multilateral free trade arrangements, TPP negotiations focus on the formulation of standards and rules, hoping to reshape the Asia-Pacific and even global trade rules with this as a sample. Therefore, the pursuit of "full coverage" and "high standards" is its distinctive feature.
However, TPP agreement may create new imbalances and uncertainties. The participating countries in TPP negotiations include developed countries such as the United States and Canada, as well as developing countries such as Brunei and Vietnam. Many experts pointed out that TPP requires a drastic reduction in trade protection, restrictions on the supervision of foreign investors, the adoption of the so-called equal opportunity principle for government procurement, and the setting of high standards for financial liberalization, which is beyond the development stage of many developing countries, and is likely to exceed the range that their domestic enterprises can bear.
Recently, Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz and Adam Hirsch, an economist at Roosevelt Institute, also jointly wrote that there were many large business lobby groups during the negotiation of TPP agreement. Judging from the monopoly right of patented drugs and the investor-host country dispute settlement mechanism, the TPP agreement led by the United States has nothing to do with "free" trade, but is more "artificially operated" trade-the main beneficiaries choose profitable companies and industries.
TPP will have an impact on China's foreign trade in the short term.
After the TPP negotiations, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Commerce said that the agreement is one of the important free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region. China is open to the system construction that conforms to the rules of the World Trade Organization and is conducive to promoting economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region. It is hoped that this agreement and other free trade arrangements in the region will promote each other and contribute to trade, investment and economic development in the Asia-Pacific region.
At present, China has not joined the agreement, but it does not rule out that China will join in due course in the future. In the short term, the agreement may have a certain impact on China's foreign trade, but in the long term, under the background of economic globalization, any multilateral trade arrangement can't exclude non-agreement countries and regions from the international trading system, otherwise their own development will be greatly restricted.
In recent years, with the signing of China-Sweden, China-ROK and China-Australia free trade agreements, the negotiation of comprehensive investment agreements between China and the United States and China-EU has been accelerated, the pilot projects such as Shanghai Free Trade Zone have been continuously developed, the negotiation of "regional comprehensive economic partnership" and the construction of the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Zone have been steadily advanced, and the construction of the "Belt and Road" has been continuously promoted. China presents a deep-seated, high-level and all-round foreign trade opening pattern. Many experts pointed out that the expected impact of TPP agreement on China is limited.
Judging from the evolution of world trade, the global trade pattern is always in a dynamic state and has its own laws to follow. Nowadays, bilateral and regional free trade arrangements have developed rapidly and become an important driving force for the in-depth development of economic globalization. China will continue to strive to reach high-level bilateral and regional free trade arrangements, constantly improve the new mechanism of open economy, and inject sustained impetus into industrial upgrading, structural adjustment and innovative development.