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ABSTRACT
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was the first of the ‘Mega-FTAs’ to be signed. Had it been ratified, it would have created the world’s largest preferential trade area. The negotiators of the TPP aspired to create ‘a next-generation transformative agreement’ that would address a new trade agenda focused on regulatory coherence and business facilitation. The expectation was that this agenda would generate a 21st Century trade politics that would be less contentious, at least among business actors, than traditional negotiations on market access. Studies of another Mega-FTA under negotiation, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that has a similar agenda found unified business support for the agreement domestically and the emergence of transnational business coalitions in support of the agreement. Recent theorising on trade politics suggests, however, that global value chains (GVCs) that involve vertical intra-industry trade introduce ‘traditional’ distributional issues that will divide business interests domestically – and, in the case of GVCs organised on different geographical bases, internationally as well. This cleavage was evident in the TPP negotiations, unlike those for TTIP, as were other divisions among business – both domestically and across countries – over the sharing of existing rents and of new rents generated by regulatory harmonisation.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to participants in these events and to Peter Drahos, Bruce Muirhead, Andrew Thompson and two anonymous referees for comments. Thanks also to Caroline Cottet for research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
John Ravenhill is Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo.
Notes
1 Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore, the US and Vietnam.
2 The other Mega-FTAs under negotiation at the time of writing (mid-2016) are the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which would link the EU and the US, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, whose participants are ASEAN, Australia, China, India, Japan, Republic of Korea and New Zealand.
3 I focus on the four ‘Western’ parliamentary democracies because these were the only countries to call for public submissions on the TPP that were then made available on-line.
The Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade made a call for submissions on the TPP that was kept open until the agreement was finalised in October 2015 (http://dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/tpp/negotiations/Pages/submissions.aspx); the New Zealand government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade made a general call for submissions regarding the enlargement of the P4 (Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore) to include the US, plus a specific call regarding the P4 negotiations with the US on financial services (http://mfat.govt.nz/Trade-and-Economic-Relations/2-Trade-Relationships-and-Agreements/Trans-Pacific/index.php). The Parliaments of Australia, Canada and New Zealand all held enquiries into the final TPP text in the first half of 2016: the enquiry by the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties was aborted when the government called an election (although some representations made to the Committee are available on the websites of the organisations that made the submissions); the Parliament of Canada’s enquiry was held by its Standing Committee on International Trade (http://www.parl.gc.ca/Committees/en/CIIT/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=8790900); that in New Zealand was conducted by the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, (https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/business-before-committees/document/00DBSCH_ITR_68247_1/international-treaty-examination-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership). The Office of the United States Trade Representative staged separate hearings on Canada, Japan, Malaysia and Mexico's admission to the TPP negotiations as well as two more general investigations into US participation and one that looked specifically at the potential environmental impact of an agreement. (https://www.regulations.gov/searchResults?rpp=25&po=0&s=Trans%2BPacific%2BPartnership&fp=true&ns=true)
4 Data available from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TX.VAL.MANF.ZS.UN.
5 UNCTAD (2015 #7457@Annex Table 05) available at http://unctad.org/Sections/dite_dir/docs/WIR2015/WIR15_tab05.xls.
6 The only other TPP members besides Japan and Canada ($238 billion) that are listed individually in the US data are Australia ($44.7bn) and Mexico ($17.6bn) (Organization for International Investment Citation2014).
7 OECD, ‘FDI Positions by Partner Country’, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=FDI_FLOW_PARTNER.
8 The auto industry directly employs in assembly and parts manufacturing more than 830,000 people in the US, and is the largest source of the country’s manufactured exports, and employs 700,000 in Mexico and a further 115,000 in Canada (Bernard Citation2013, Hill et al. Citation2015, Mauldin and Althaus Citation2015, United States International Trade Commission Citation2016). The textile industry employs about a quarter of a million people in the US, and 415,000 in Mexico, nearly 20 per cent of that country’s total employment in manufacturing: in Canada, the sector is relatively small, employing only 18,000 (Platzer Citation2013, International Trade Administration Citation2016b, Citation2016a).
9 At one point, it was reported that the Tier One suppliers were lobbying to require that the domestic content required for the most sophisticated auto parts be higher than those for less sophisticated items, typically manufactured by smaller companies (Chase Citation2015). Certainly, there was little evidence of solidarity with SMEs in the negotiations.
10 The TPP Apparel Coalition comprised the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the National Retail Federation, the Outdoor Industry Association, the Retail Industry Leaders Association and the US Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel. Together these associations represent most of the retailers and distributors of brand-name clothing and footwear in the US.
11 The percentage weighted average Most-Favoured Nation tariff for TPP participants in 2013 (unless otherwise noted) was: Australia 2.76, Brunei (2006) 4.28, Canada 3.59, Chile 5.99, Japan (2012) 3.02, Malaysia (2009) 5.50, Mexico (2010) 3.29, New Zealand 2.73, Peru 2.75, Singapore 0.28, the US 2.55, Vietnam (2010) 7.14. Data from World Integrated Trade Solution, http://wits.worldbank.org/Default.aspx (accessed 24 August 2015).
12 It was not only in the US that such divisions between industry and agriculture occurred – on Japan see Mulgan (Citation2011).
13 For discussion in the context of the TTIP negotiations, see de Ville and Siles-Brugge (Citation2016: 41–2, 53–9).
14 See also Internet Property Watch (Citation2016).
15 US ISPs were generally relaxed about the TPP: US proposals contained provisions very similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that governs domestic ISPs. No references to TPP appear on the website of the peak body – the US Internet Service Provider Association [http://usispa.org/].
16 On the opposition of civil interest groups to the TTIP see de Ville and Siles-Brugge (Citation2016: ch. 4) and Young (Citation2016, 10–11, 9–23). It would be inaccurate to suggest that all civil society actors were opposed to the TPP: the majority of civil society submissions to the various USTR inquiries on the TPP came from chambers of commerce, which voiced enthusiastic support for the proposed treaty.
17 An exception was the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Division (Public Citizen Citation2009), whose submission to the initial USTR enquiry into the TPP advocated that the Obama administration should reverse the decision of its predecessor to join the TPP talks. The International Fund for Animal Welfare, and Humane Society International also made submissions – three from civil interest groups out of a total of 62.
18 A search on the websites of Greenpeace Canada and Oxfam Canada for ‘TPP’ generated no results. Representatives of five civil interest groups gave evidence to the Canadian Parliamentary Inquiry into the TPP: Doctors Without Borders, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, Grandmothers Advocacy Network, Friends of Medicare and the Trade Justice Network
19 See, for instance, the special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs 69, 5 (2015) titled ‘Australian Trade Policy: A Decade on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement’.
21 For instance, Public Health Association Australia (Citation2016).