China will later this month enter talks to create an Asian free-trade
bloc covering 28% of world GDP
China will later this month enter
talks to create an Asian free-trade bloc covering 28 percent of world GDP, a
reaction to U.S. progress in forming a Trans-Pacific Partnership that excludes
China, South Korean Trade Minister Taeho Bark said on Monday.
The RCEP, or Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership, will be comprised of the 10-nation ASEAN
club plus six others: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New
Zealand.
Its launch is to be formally
announced at the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh later this month, with a goal of
reaching a deal to lower trade barriers across the region by the end of 2015.
RCEP adds to a growing web of
regional and sectoral trade negotiations that has sprung up after a decade of
talks failed to conclude a global trade deal, the so-called Doha Round.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) championed by President Barack Obama's administration aims to tear down
traditional trade barriers and break ground in new areas, streamlining trade
between the United States and 10 other countries.
"We're organising trade
relations with countries other than CHINA so that China starts feeling more
pressure about meeting basic international standards," Obama said in a
presidential debate with Governor Mitt Romney two weeks ago.
Bark said RCEP had grown out of a
plan to launch trilateral trade talks between China, Japan and South Korea.
Some ASEAN countries, worried about the trilateral initiative, pushed for a
wider deal.
"China's position on this
economic integration in East Asia was pushed by TPP," Bark said in a
lecture organised by the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration in Geneva.
"In the past, China didn't
want to have ASEAN plus six, they only wanted plus three. Japan preferred ASEAN
plus six. China preferred anything without the United States," he said.
"I don't know how much they
hope to get but they want to do it because of the TPP."
Spaghetti
If both RCEP and the TPP came
into existence, they would be similar in economic size to the European Union.
"Those are the three big
blocks in the future," Bark said.
In the long run, the goal of the
21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group is to merge RCEP and
the TPP, he said. That would bring the United States and China into an agreement
to deepen trade liberalisation, succeeding where 10 years of talks at the World
Trade Organization failed.
But achieving that final goal
depends on RCEP achieving a "high quality" deal, not just simplifying
an existing tangle of bilateral agreements, which Bark called "the
spaghetti bowl".
"At this moment we are
setting very high ambitions. We include all tariff lines," he said.
But many developing country
members might want to water down RCEP by asking for special treatment. South
Korea will demand an exemption to protect its rice farmers, while Japan is also
likely to want carve-outs for agriculture.
If the signatories' squeamishness
at opening their markets does not devalue RCEP, they might be forced to lower
their sights in any case to meet the three-year schedule. If so, RCEP could end
up having little influence on regional trade.
The trilateral talks are still
expected to go ahead, although the planned launch, originally set for the Phnom
Penh summit, is likely to be postponed to later in the year due to a
territorial dispute between China and Japan, Bark said.
South Korea is also separately
negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement with China, which would enable
some 25,000 South Korean firms operating in China to supply the domestic
market, rather than exporting their Chinese-produced goods as they are obliged
to do now, he said.
China wanted quick negotiations,
Bark said, while South Korea hoped for a bilateral deal within two or three
years.
Reuters
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. Since we are currently changing the platform of www.yourvietnamexpert.com, you may contact us at: sbc.pte@gmail.com, provisionally. Many thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment