The Sun Daily 16 July 2012
TPP talks likely to conclude by October 2013
Ee Ann Nee
KUALA LUMPUR (July 16, 2012): The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has gone through 13 rounds of negotiations, could be concluded by October next year, East Asian International Economic Law and Policy Programme chairman Lim Chin Leng said.
The TPP is a free trade agreement (FTA) initiative involving nine countries namely Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam. Canada and Mexico are also scheduled to be included in the TPP negotiations by year-end.
Lim, who is also a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the TPP will be beneficial to Malaysia and will make it more competitive, even when there are concerns on Malaysia’s participation in the TPP.
"The TPP will lock in some of Malaysia’s liberalisation. We will resemble the US a little bit more, and that may not be a bad thing. The way we run our economy will be more open. But if we pull back from the TPP, we lose preferential access to the US market," Lim told reporters at a luncheon talk on the impact of TPP and Hong Kong’s accession to the Asean-China FTA on Friday.
"It’s about making sure we get access to our own export markets so that even when our trading partners are on offensive interests, for instance in procurement, we would want to calibrate the liberalisation of the procurement market in such a way that it fits our own policy preferences, while imposing procurement discipline on our trading partners, which get us access," he said.
"I’m optimistic about the TPP and what it could do. There will be certain concerns from certain segments of the industry and this is perfectly normal. Businesses don’t always love competition. We have to figure where we can compete and where we might want to buy some time for the sectors."
Although Malaysia has FTAs with most of the TPP members, the TPP is a positive step towards deeper integration within the Asia-Pacific and would allow Malaysia to engage with the US, which remains an important trading partner and source of investment.