{"id":758,"date":"2023-04-12T19:38:03","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T02:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/?p=758"},"modified":"2023-04-12T19:40:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T02:40:04","slug":"u-k-to-join-growing-pacific-trade-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/u-k-to-join-growing-pacific-trade-club\/","title":{"rendered":"U.K. to Join Growing Pacific Trade Club"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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By Yuki Taylor<\/em><\/strong>
Law Student Editor<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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On March 8, 2018, 11 countries, namely Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Viet Nam, signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP<\/a>), a version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) succeeding the withdrawal of the United States.\u00a0 On December 30, 2018, CPTPP entered into force, with ratification by a majority (Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, and Viet Nam).\u00a0 The free trade agreement (FTA) concluded as a contingency to TPP has thus far been ratified by 10 original signatories except for Brunei, representing approximately\u00a013% of global GDP<\/a>.<\/p>

The origin of TPP was a 2005 trade pact between a small group of Pacific Rim countries comprising Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore.\u00a0 In September 2008,\u00a0President George W. Bush<\/a>\u00a0announced that the United States would begin talks with the group, leading Australia, Vietnam, and Peru to join. \u00a0The United States was the lead architect, with support from U.S. presidents from both political parties.\u00a0 TPP was set to become the world\u2019s largest FTA, covering 40% of the global economy, and would have been the\u00a0most comprehensive commercial accord<\/a>\u00a0since the ill-fated 1948 Charter for an International Trade Organization (ITO).\u00a0 On February 4, 2016, TPP was signed by the 11 CPTPP signatories plus the United States under the Obama Administration with a presidential comment that \u201cTPP allows America \u2013 and not countries like China \u2013 to write the rules of the road in the 21st century<\/a>, which is especially important in a region as dynamic as the Asia-Pacific.\u201d<\/p>

Unlike most treaty negotiations, the TPP drafts were kept secret until a completed draft was ready to be released.\u00a0 In the United States, the TPP text was\u00a0classified<\/a>\u00a0until June 2014, even from the eyes of Congress.\u00a0 On his first day in office, on January 23, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order withdrawing the U.S. signature from the TPP,\u00a0because it was \u201ctoo complicated\u201d for him to understand or even read, and it was part of a Chinese plot<\/a>.\u00a0 China was not part of the negotiations, however.<\/p>

To salvage the pact, the remaining 11 signatories continued talks and agreed to CPTPP one year later.\u00a0 Further, the U.S.\u2019s withdrawal essentially paved a way for China to join the world\u2019s largest FTA, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP<\/a>), which was signed by 15 Asia-Pacific countries in November 2020.\u00a0 Consequently, six countries, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Viet Nam are\u00a0members of both CPTPP and RCEP<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>

On February 1, 2021, one year after Brexit, the UK became the first country to submit an accession request to CPTPP.\u00a0 After acquiring unanimous consent among all original signatories, on March 31, 2023,\u00a0UK\u2019s accession was substantially concluded<\/a>, and the former EU member soon joins the FTA in the Pacific region.\u00a0 Following the UK, five other states have thus far requested accession to the FTA, specifically China and Taiwan in September 2021, Ecuador in December 2021, Costa Rica in August 2022, and Uruguay in December 2022.\u00a0 No other membership applications have earned the\u00a0requisite unanimous consent<\/a>\u00a0to commence negotiations.\u00a0<\/p>

The UK\u2019s membership to CPTPP would reportedly result in a\u00a0trivial increase in the nation\u2019s GDP<\/a>, calculated at 0.1% in exchange for losing 4% from Brexit.\u00a0 The UK Investment Minister Dominic Johnson defends the membership on the basis that the FTA is also a\u00a0salient concept<\/a>\u00a0to help boost the economy in many intangible ways while protecting state sovereignty for the domestic economy.\u00a0 CPTPP is currently the fourth largest trade bloc after RCEP, the USMCA, and the EU.\u00a0 With the high bar set for accession, an increase in CPTPP membership may be limited in the future.\u00a0 However, now that CPTPP includes three G7 members, Canada, Japan, and the UK, the prestige of its membership is certainly heightened.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Yuki TaylorLaw Student Editor On March 8, 2018, 11 countries, namely Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Viet Nam, signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) succeeding the withdrawal of the United States.\u00a0 On December 30, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[169,172,121,170,171],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":762,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions\/762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.asucollegeoflaw.com\/ibt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}