International Trade

Transnational corporations are secretly and undemocratically, formulating the rules of the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). The world’s largest ever, free trade deal will be the most powerful tool in corporate resistance to the COP21 agreement. There was great...

At the last Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in November 2015, the United States and China advanced their own set of interests with respect to trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region. While the United States celebrated the conclusion of...

On 29 September, President Enrique Peña Nieto formally launched an initiative he had first announced in November 2014 to create, for the first time in Mexico, three special economic zones (SEZs) in the country’s poorest states. The next day, Peña...

Relations between the US and South Africa have hit another low in a series of trade disputes that go as far back as 2003. While strengthening its relations with other countries, the US has threatened to suspend South Africa from...

Alongside this week’s APEC leaders’ summit in Manila, US President Obama met counterparts and trade ministers from 11 other Asia-Pacific states that agreed in October to the expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These states, covering around 40% of world GDP, cannot...

The issue of liberalising Japan’s agricultural market presented a major, if not the major hurdle to the Abe administration’s agreement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal struck in Atlanta on 5 October 2015. Japan has agreed to abolish tariffs on...

The ink is dry and the full text of the major trade deal between the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, is available to the public. And it contains plenty of lessons that can be...

This month’s long-awaited release of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text was the result of years of negotiations on trade ties between nations around the Pacific Rim. Some six weeks earlier, another set of deliberations came to an end as the...

While the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has potential to split Asia Pacific, it could be a foundation for truly free trade, along with other free trade plans in the region. While the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has potential to split Asia Pacific,...

After more than five years of missed deadlines, trade ministers from the 12 participating Asia-Pacific countries that met in Atlanta finally concluded the negotiations surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on 5 October 2015. So is the TPP settled? The short...

In a surprising development, US congressional Republicans and a few of their business allies now pose the biggest threat to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). With the announcement of the agreement on 5 October, there was no support from a single...

After five years of struggle, the United States, Japan and 10 other economies in Asia and Latin America signed a massive trade pact: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The winners are obvious: US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo...

Labor’s proposals designed to “safeguard” Australian workers under the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) are a step in the right direction and are likely to break the impasse that has prevented the trade agreement passing through the Senate. In essence,...

A bipartisan letter from the US House of Representatives has urged the US government to verbally and physically challenge, China’s purported claims to 12 nautical mile territorial seas around its artificial formations in the South China Sea. The letter also...

The recent Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement presents Asia with good, bad and ugly scenarios. Had the TPP failed, that would have been a severe blow to the credibility of the United States in Asia. Yet, it excludes Asia’s largest economies –...