The recently negotiated Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – dubbed by MB as TPP 2.0 – looks to be facing numerous roadblocks to ratification, according to the Nikkei Times:
The remaining members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact will soon sign a revised agreement, but the big question remains whether local politics — like those in the U.S. — will once again emerge as a stumbling block…
The Abe government will submit a proposal ratifying the pact next month, along with a package of relevant bills. When the parliament debated the original 12-member TPP, signed in 2016, all opposition parties except for Nippon Ishin no Kai came out against the deal. The same pushback is expected this time since the new agreement is not dramatically different from the first…
If the TPP-11 were to get similarly bogged down in debate, passage of the trade agreement by the June close of the legislative session could be put in doubt.
As the leader on the TPP, the onus is on Japan to quickly approve the deal. “Many nations are disinclined to be the first [to ratify], and they are monitoring Japan,” said a source close to the negotiations. If Japanese lawmakers drag their feet, they could delay the ratification process in other signatory nations as well.
Mexico will vote for its next president in July, which may lead to a change in government. Canada, a one-time holdout, now says it will sign the agreement. But it is still unclear when the Canadian parliament will schedule a ratification vote…
Good. Seeing as TPP 2.0 is unlikely be ratified any time soon across member nations, this should give the newly elected Labor Government the opportunity to refer the deal to the Productivity Commission to assess its economy-wide impacts before it is ratified by the Australian Parliament.
Meanwhile, a new paper by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has warned that agreements like the TPP enrich individual corporations by design, which comes at the expense of workers and national economies. From the Institute of New Economic Thinking:
[Rodrik] contends that economists see trade in general as a positive, but have disengaged from the ways in which trade agreements play out in reality:
“[T]he label ‘free trade agreements’ does not do a very good job of describing what recent proposed agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and numerous other regional and bilateral trade agreements actually do”.
Given their blind spots, economists share the blame for confusion about what real-world impacts these agreements have…
…the pacts increasingly reflect first and foremost corporate interests, as multinationals have muscled their way to a central role in negotiations… So it’s not surprising that trade agreements that change the rules governing domestic economic life risk undermining the welfare of ordinary citizens.
Recent trade agreements have added another feature called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) procedure, which gives a foreign corporation the right to sue a host country government in a special arbitration tribunal…
The logical next question to ask is how these issues made their way into trade agreement design and negotiations to begin with. Here, Rodrik provides evidence that, as noted above, multinational corporations inserted themselves into the trade negotiation process, packaging such factors as patent rules as trade issues—in intensive lobbying efforts backed by campaign donations, and in public relations campaigns—in order to serve their special interests. Rather than enlarging the economic possibilities of countries involved, trade agreement negotiations of this type often disrupt the lives of those in the middle and at the bottom, while showering benefits on the top and offering miniscule gains economy-wide. And often, it is the multinational corporations and financial institutions that stand to gain at the expense of workers and national economies.
Even more reason to refer TPP 2.0 to the Productivity Commission to assess its economy-wide impacts.
