Xinhua, Maui, the United States :
The United States and 11 other countries in the Asia Pacific region are expected to tackle the most difficult outstanding issues for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and substantially conclude the controversial trade talks this week, a leading U.S. trade expert said.
“I think the TPP ministers are going to Hawaii with the hope that they can finish or substantially complete the negotiations,” Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), told Xinhua in an interview, referring to the upcoming TPP trade ministers’ meetings set to kick off here Tuesday.
“Doing so is only the first part of the process, because then they have to go home and have the agreement ratified and approved by their legislatures,” said Schott, who is leading the PIIE’s work on TPP and watching the trade talks closely.
Talks on the TPP had been stuck for months as other participating countries were reluctant to make major concessions needed to close a deal before the U.S. Congress granted the trade promotion authority, also known as the fast-track authority, to President Barack Obama.
That trade authority would allow the U.S. president to submit trade deals to Congress for an up-or-down vote without amendments, which is crucial for the swift congressional consideration of a TPP deal.
With the fast track authority in hands by the end of last month following weeks of tough fight in Congress, the Obama administration is stepping up efforts to push for an early conclusion of the Asia-Pacific trade pact.
U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said earlier this month that he hoped to finalize the TPP trade deal “in the near term” and send it to Congress for ratification before the end of this year.
“That would be a very ambitious schedule, and more likely it would fall over into early 2016,” said Schott.
The TPP, covering about 40 percent of global economy and believed to be the biggest trade agreement in the world in the past two decades, is central to the Obama administration’s policy of advancing economic engagement in Asia and writing the rules for international trade in the 21st century.
Schott said “a large majority of the agreement is very close to completion” after more than five years of negotiations, and there are “only a small number” of issues remaining open.
But these outstanding issues are “generally the most difficult, the most complex, or the most political sensitive,” he said, citing examples of rules on the intellectual property, discipline on the state-owned enterprises, labor and environmental provisions, and the investor-state dispute settlement.
One of the highlights of the upcoming four-day trade ministers’ meetings is whether the United States and Japan, the two biggest players in the TPP, could complete their bilateral market access negotiations of agriculture and autos, which had stalled overall TPP trade talks.
