The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Path to Free Trade in the Asia Pacific ed by Peter C.Y. Chow (review)

The World Trade Organization's (WTO) intra and inter-regional trade data shows that there are three main centres of the world's trade. The first is in the EU in which Africa and Eurasia are interconnected, the second is in North America in which Latin America is interconnected, and the third is in Asia where the Middle East is interconnected. Within these three centres, there is a strong inter-regional trade linkage between North America and Asia. This explains why Asia Pacific has the potential to be the largest regional economic cooperation on earth.

This book discusses "mega regionalism cooperation", which earned massive support in the second decade of the twenty-first century after the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations made significant progress. This phenomenon of mega regionalism in Asia Pacific is indeed interesting and very important. Sharing the optimism on this phenomena, this book argues that the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) is the long-run objective of the Asia Pacific's mega regionalism journey. The U.S.'s role significantly affected the TPP which was formerly known as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement or P4.

Part I of this book consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, Chow provides the context of regionalism in Asia Pacific, such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), East Asian economic integration, ASEAN-centred open regionalism, ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the TPP and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This chapter argues that the TPP is more advanced in terms of trade liberalization and economic reform than the RCEP, therefore the former is considered as the "WTO extra" while the latter as the "WTO Plus" (p. 9). In Chapter 2, Barfield explains the two-level game in finding the equilibrium between the international aims of the U.S. executive government and the U.S. domestic interest in parliament. This chapter describes the strategy on how to obtain parliament support for the TPP. In Chapter 3, Cheng and Lee explain the competition between the U.S.-led TPP and the China-anchored RCEP (p. 49). In this context, they feature three countries: the United States, China and Taiwan, where Taiwan's accession to the TPP was immune from the competition between the TPP and RCEP.

Part II, consisting of Chapters 4–7, estimates the economic impact of joining the TPP, and mainly focuses on Taiwan's accession. It features several other countries: Indonesia; the Philippines; Thailand; South Korea; and China. Chapter 4 by Ciurak and Xiao utilizes a dynamic Computable Generalizable Equilibrium (CGE) model to assess the impact of Taiwan's accession to the TPP. They find that Taiwan's accession will have a positive impact on its economy by increasing economic growth by 2.8 per cent and household income up to US$29 billion (p. 108). In Chapter 5, Chow also utilizes the CGE simulation with the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) 9.0 data and finds that most of the candidate countries — namely, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand — will benefit if Taiwan joins the TPP (p. 143). In Chapter 6, Ciurak and Xiao assess the impact of Taiwan's accession to the TPP on the U.S. economy. Similar to their article in Chapter 4, they find that the United States will obtain an additional US$9.2 billion in its GDP and US$5.6 billion in household income. In Chapter 7, Chow and Hsu use a CGE simulation with GTAP data and find that trade creation gains would increase along with the increasing number of TPP member states (p. 89).

Part III of this book consists of four chapters, Chapters 8–11. This part focuses on the impact of the TPP from developed countries' interests in particular on: agriculture liberalization; pharmaceutical industry; trade in services; and intellectual property rights (IPRs) issues. In Chapter 8, Tuan and Somwaru...