Australia, Peru and Vietnam have expressed interest in joining a budding Asia-Pacific tariff-busting plan that received a boost yesterday with the participation of the US, officials said.
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab announced the launching of negotiations for the US to join a free trade agreement now confined to Singapore, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei.
The “Comprehensive Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership” agreement, the first trade pact involving a group of Pacific Rim countries, has a broad objective of tearing down trade barriers among participants within a decade.
The first round of negotiations for participation of the US, which has already joined discussions to free up investment and financial services among the five, will be held early next year in Singapore.
“While the United States is the first additional country to seek to join the four original members of the [agreement], we are confident that other countries in the region will ultimately embrace the benefits of participation,” Schwab told a news conference, with ministers from the four countries beside her.
“This high-standard regional agreement will enhance the competitiveness of the countries that are part of it and help promote and facilitate trade and investment among them, increasing their economic growth and development,” she said.
She did not name the countries that had shown interest in joining but officials said they were Australia, Peru and Vietnam.
“I think Australia has shown considerable interest — Peru as well — and there could be one or two other countries,” Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo (楊榮文) said.
“I know Vietnam is studying it very closely ... I am hopeful other countries will also come around,” he said.
The US decision to join the agreement will give impetus to a long-term initiative within the 21-member APEC forum to forge a free-trade agreement of the Asia-Pacific, officials said.
Aside from the US, Australia, Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei, Vietnam and Peru, APEC consists of China, Russia, Japan, Canada and other key economies.
Economies in the APEC group, which has a loose objective of achieving free trade and investment in the Pacific Rim by 2020, account for nearly half of world trade.
Yeo indicated that some APEC members could even join the trans-Pacific agreement before the APEC summit in Peru in November.
Under the agreement, tariffs on all trade products are eliminated within 12 years, with tariffs on 90 percent of trade in goods among the parties eliminated immediately.
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