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The world’s largest trade agreement between 15 countries entered into force on New Year’s Eve. It promises an increase in the income of every third person on the planet and gives globalization supporters hope for a revival of world trade and cooperation after several grim years marked by the coronavirus pandemic and aggressive protectionism of the United States and China.
The grand Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (CFIP) brought together China and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Japan and South Korea.
China, the world’s third-largest economy after the United States and the European Union, has never signed multilateral trade agreements, much less with its sworn enemy, Japan.
It is true that the signing of this agreement in November 2020 did not prevent China from arguing with Australia, its main supplier of fossil fuels, before its entry into force on 1 January 2022. China was offended that Australia supported the demands for investigation into the origin of KOVID-19 and is still boycotting its coal, grain, beef and wine, Pogled.info reports.
However, the new trade bloc will still strengthen China’s position in the world. He found himself at the center of the biggest treaty, thanks in large part to the policies of his main rival, the United States, thanks to the light hand of former US President Donald Trump.
The fact is that in the 8 years of the WRCP negotiations, its main players, Japan and Australia and New Zealand, have simultaneously created the much more advanced Trans-Pacific Trade Bloc with the Pacific, including Canada and the United States. …
However, Trump abandoned the idea and pulled America out of the talks. Which accelerated the creation of the RVIP.
The agreement will allow Asian trading partners to gain access to other markets and reduce tariffs on goods, potentially promising faster economic growth and a higher standard of living, especially for the poorest countries in the region. It is open for enlargement and India is expected to be the first newcomer.
The agreement is large-scale, but relatively superficial. This is only the first step towards integrating the very different economies of poor Laos and rich New Zealand, communist China and post-imperialist Japan.
The EDPS is far from the depths of the other major free trade areas on the planet – NAFTA between the United States, Canada and Mexico and the EU between thirty countries in the Old World.
The new agreement does not address, for example, workers’ rights and allows different countries to take different approaches to environmental protection and intellectual property rights.
In addition, it leaves part of the trade policy to the discretion of the authorities of the participating countries, ie China or Japan can still protect their market with restrictive duties and stop the freedom of trade enshrined in the new agreement. There is also no common mechanism for resolving disputes.
“The trade deal is really ambitious, it has been in talks for almost a decade,” said Mariko Oi, the BBC’s Asia business correspondent. in other trade unions “.
“But the RVIP has one distinctive feature: this union brings together countries that often have complex diplomatic relations, such as China and Japan,” she said.
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