Author: Ernest Bower, CSIS

While the United States is unquestionably a Pacific power, it lacks a comprehensive Asia strategy. In fact, the US approach to Asia has focused primarily on Northeast Asia – Japan, China and South and North Korea. Appropriately, significant focus has also been given to India in the last five years.

But since the end of the Vietnam War, American focus on Southeast Asia has been episodic and crisis driven. While the US has a substantial reservoir of strength in the region, US policy has failed to connect the dots and develop them into a rational and well articulated strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Claude Barfield, AEI

Recently, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Philip Levy and I published an International Economic Outlook, entitled ‘Tales of the South Pacific: President Obama and the Transpacific Partnership.’ In this analysis, we made the case for the Obama administration to move with dispatch in asserting U.S. leadership in the construction of a new Asian economic architecture that would be broad and inclusive. And we argued that the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) agreement was an ideal vehicle through which to achieve this goal.

Since then, bolder moves by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have increased the urgency for the Obama administration to advance a strategic vision of the U.S. role in a nascent Asian economic architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Claude Barfield and Philip I. Levy, AEI

After prolonged ambivalence about trade, President Obama finally found an agreement he could embrace – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But what is the object of the President’s new found passion? Why has the South Pacific caught his fancy when pending agreements in Latin America and Northeast Asia could not? And will this amount to anything more than the Administration’s rather empty promises to wrap up the Doha Round of WTO global trade talks?

In fact, the TPP is potentially a significant addition to U.S. trade policy. It could be a model for trade liberalisation and a means to address long-standing U.S. interests in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Andew Elek

A potential Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would be a preferential trading arrangement (PTA) to be built on the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (P4) between Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore which entered into force in 2006.

The P4 is an agreement among partners who understand the benefits of free trade. Singapore has never had any doubts while Chile and New Zealand learned the hard way. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Henry Gao

Since its inception in 2005, the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (the ‘P4 Agreement’) has been hailed as a ‘high standard’ free trade agreement (FTA). However, there has never been any official explanation as to how the assessment of the Agreement is conducted. Now it’s exam time again, let’s see how the Agreement performs in ‘Free Trade 101’.

To be deemed as ‘high-standard’, an agreement must satisfy two requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: John Ravenhill, ANU

The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTA) in the Asia-Pacific region in the last decade has been primarily a top-down affair, driven by governments acting as much for political-strategic as for economic considerations.

The consequence has been a succession of poor quality, ‘trade-lite’, agreements, towards which the business community, the supposed beneficiary of such arrangements, has been largely indifferent. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Deborah Elms, Temasek Foundation Centre for Trade & Negotiations, Singapore

The ambiguity in U.S. President Barack Obama’s November 13th statement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks mirrors the somewhat torturous path in American trade policy to date on this topic. In his speech in Tokyo, President Obama said, ‘The United States will also be engaging with the Trans-Pacific partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad-based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st century trade agreement.’

Listeners in the audience could be forgiven for confusion. Was the United States in or out? What did the President mean by ‘engage’?

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Ann Capling, University of Melbourne

At last week’s APEC meeting, United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced that the Obama Administration would participate in negotiations to establish a new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. This announcement means that the TPP negotiations – involving Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam – will now go forward, with the first round of negotiations to be held in Australia in early 2010.

The TPP is intended to be a high quality, comprehensive regional trade agreement that is consistent with APEC and WTO principles. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Author: Gary Hawke

In New Zealand, 2008 will be remembered for some remarkable successes in external economic relations, and for a change of government. The electoral fate of most governments depends on domestic success.

New Zealand became the first developed country with which China concluded an FTA, adding to notable earlier ‘firsts’: completion of negotiations for China’s admission to the WTO, recognition of China as a market economy, and entry into negotiations for an FTA. We all have to get used to recognizing such patterns as significant in international negotiations since they are influential in China, but the China-New Zealand FTA was important in other respects too. The negotiations focused less on bilateral issues than media reports did, and more on how China and New Zealand should jointly manage their interests in regional and global settings. Issues included product safety. It was ironic that the agreement was followed so closely by food contamination in San Lu, a Chinese subsidiary of New Zealand’s Fonterra.

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