5 - Trade Provisions as Legos? How Chapter 2 of the TPP Was Influenced by WTO Negotiations and Prior US Trade Deals

Summary

After several years of negotiations, twelve Pacific Rim countries signed, in February 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is one of the highest profile Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) of the last decade. After US withdrawal in January 2017, a revised “Comprehensive and Progressive TPP” was signed by the other eleven negotiating Parties in March 2018. The CPTPP makes no modifications to the original Chapter 2 so the chapter remains in its entirety applicable to relations among the Parties. References in the chapter are to the original TPP unless context requires otherwise. Annex 2-D of the TPP is comprised of hundreds of pages of carefully negotiated tariff commitments that are accompanied by many chapters that seek to regulate measures such as trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, competition policy, state-owned enterprises and electronic commerce. Together, these provisions were part of a complex framework that sought to ensure that the agreed tariff elimination would not be undermined or nullified by other measures. However, the TPP was designed to be more than just a traditional trade deal.