Trans Pacific Partnership Paper

Unit 2 PaperMichele SimmonsTrans-Pacific PartnershipThe Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement. As of 2014 the following countries are participating in negotiations to create this agreement. Those countries are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. This agreement if passed is going to be one of the biggest trade agreements to date. It involves 26 percent of the world’s trade and in 2012 numbers it represented 39 percent of the world’s GDP (International Financial Law Review, 2014) and two of the top three economies of the world – the U.S. and Japan (Donnan, 2015).Some of the areas the TPP will address are customs, e-commerce, environmental issues, financial services, government procurement, intellectual property (IP), investment, labor, dispute resolution mechanisms, market access for goods, rules of origin, telecommunications, and trade remedies. The TPP will aim to reduce tariffs and barriers to trade and investment among member states which will then help to create economic integration, growth and innovation (IFLR, 2014).  One criticism of the TPP is that by easing trade, investment and other economic opportunities among member nations the agreement will essentially increase barriers between member nations and non-member nations (IFLR, 2014). In this paper I will discuss the impact of the agreement on the United States, Japan and China. The United States uses Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) when discussing free trade agreements. This authority allows the government to negotiate agreements and bring the agreement to Congress for them to approve or deny as is in its entirety. Congress isn’t allowed to pick it apart or change parts of the agreement (The Economist, Nov. 2014). In the case of the TPP, President Obama has not sought to gain this authority in advance of negotiations. Instead, negotiations have been taking place secretly and without the public knowing what the negotiations involve (Feldman, 2014).  Feldman sees the U.S. strategy for negotiation and ratification as “backwards” (2014). The goal was for the President to bring Congress a deal they couldn’t refuse. If TPP fails this would take the pressure off Japan and China allowing them to refuse to reform their economies. The credibility of the U.S. would also now be in question. Yet when President Obama talks about TPP, he doesn’t talk about our credibility or making sure we are still a dominant power in the world, he mainly talks about protecting American jobs (Nov. 2015).