Executive summary
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) appears more likely to reinforce recent trends toward offshore investment, production, and job creation rather than to reverse those trends.
- Developments in China in the coming years will have a significant impact on future trends in trade, investment, production, and job creation in the region and beyond.
- Unless the United States can continue to attract high levels of productive domestic investment, its ability to generate solid rates of economic growth with full employment, rising incomes, and reduced levels of income inequality will be weakened.
The United States must remain an active participant in the global economy, but particularly in the fast-growing and highly populated Asia-Pacific region. As the most ambitious of all US preferential trade agreements to date, the TPP covers a wide range of substantive issues important to US exporters and investors. As negotiations progress however, it is becoming clear that the TPP agreement contains some serious flaws and fails to address some important trade-distorting practices that are particularly prevalent in Asia. The US must seek to ensure that this regional agreement establishes an open, transparent regime that truly facilitates the movement of goods and services, rather than merely overlaying a complex set of rules and standards on top of the existing network of bilateral free trade agreements.