The trade deal that has been struck among the US, Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim nations will be the biggest one since 1994 when the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created on the conclusion of the Uruguay Round. This will be so when this deal – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – comes into force. However, this will be no easy task. Before TPP comes into force, it will require to be formally signed by the leaders of each country and ratified by their legislatures whose support for the deal, as available indications suggest, is not universal. There are also critics around the world who see it as a deal negotiated in secret, biased towards corporations and being somewhat in conflict with the spirit of multilateralism which is the cornerstone of the WTO. Yet then, it will be too naive to ignore the potential impact of the TPP on the evolving pattern of international trade and investment flows in today’s globalised economy. The TPP will cover 40 per cent of the global economy. It is purported to creating a Pacific economic bloc with reduced trade barriers to the flow of ‘agreed-upon’ goods and services and with new standards and rules for investment, environment, and labour. Furthermore, it envisions rules of conduct for state-owned enterprises and a ban on hindering the free flow of data across borders. Its Investor-State Dispute Settlement Mechanism (ISDSH) will allow investors to bring TPP governments to arbitration. This, according to some critics, may undermine governments’ ability to regulate them. The TPP deal will have some major geo-political implications. Since it excludes China, critics say, it is designed to counter the rise of China in the Pacific and beyond. On a global level, the conclusion of the TPP is most likely to put new pressures on the European Union (EU) to conclude its negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US before Mr. Obama leaves office in 15 months’ time. Besides, yet another issue of consequence is whether countries such as China and India will now feel the urgency for finalising their own regional deals. There is no denying that ‘mega-regional’ deals like TPP and the would-be TTIP raise important questions about the future of the WTO whose 14-year-old Doha Round of global trade talks have remained stalled for long. Such questions have critical relevance to the low-income economies and least developed countries (LDCs) like Bangladesh who have largely benefited under the ruled-based multilateral trade regime that is administered by the WTO. Admittedly, there is now a growing focus in leading global economies on “mega-regional” agreements such as the TPP. Countries like Bangladesh cannot ignore this. They have to draw up strategies and action plans about how to cope with this new emerging trend about such trade agreements that tend to become alternatives to the WTO-type “multilateraslism” and that might also one day “be stitched together into a global deal”. The TPP deal has already made the Bangladesh’s readymade garment (RMG) manufacturers jittery. They consider that this deal, when it comes into force, will lead to loss of their competitiveness in the RMG sector to other countries like Vietnam. But Bangladesh alone cannot tackle this issue, even if it does all the best on the home turf to make its RMG sector more efficient. Hence, it is high time for Bangladesh to revamp and reshape its trade policy and related actions so that it can be better prepared to face the situation that may herald the beginning of a new era of trade liberalisation globally through ‘mega-regional’ agreements.
