Like agricultural goods, manufactures are protected by an array of restrictions that benefit
domestic industries such as automobiles, electronics, and clothing. The TPP negotiations aim to
dismantle tariffs and liberalize NTMs that inhibit trade flows by inter alia introducing lessrestrictive
rules of origin and creating nondiscriminatory access to government procurement
contracts.3
In services, negotiations are seeking to liberalize barriers to trade and investment across all
modes of supply and will introduce new disciplines on foreign investment to ensure
nondiscriminatory treatment and provide security and protection to foreign investors. Priority
attention is being given to key infrastructure services like finance, insurance,
telecommunications, air express delivery, and other transport services. The goal is to reduce
restrictions on commercial presence and establish new disciplines on foreign investment to
ensure nondiscriminatory treatment, security, and greater transparency (for example, by
removing or reducing limitations on foreign ownership and giving foreign individuals and firms
the right to provide cross-border services without the requirement to establish commercial
presence).
The TPP will thus do more than grant preferential access to member countries. It will also create
an extensive new trade rulebook with broad-ranging obligations on investment policy
comparable or greater than those embodied in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) along with
enforcement provisions such as investor-state dispute procedures. As such, the TPP investment
chapter will be a “BITs-plus” accord, which should encourage flows of FDI.
The TPP rulebook also aims to include new disciplines on issues like SOEs, competition policy,
environment, and labor, starting from existing WTO commitments and FTA obligations as a
baseline for the negotiations. The “additionality” will come from WTO-plus provisions in areas
not yet subject to WTO disciplines, FTA-plus provisions that augment existing FTA
commitments, and development provisions to assist in enhancing human capital, technology
transfer, capacity building, and assistance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The “plus”
provisions will focus mainly on new issues that affect businesses and consumers. For example,
the prevalence of significant SOEs in the economies of several TPP participants has prompted
negotiators to focus on crafting new rules to level the playing field between private firms and
SOEs, including new disciplines on the provision of public funds. The objective is not to force
privatization but rather to ensure competitive neutrality between public and private firms in
access to finance, factors of production, and distribution of goods and services in the
marketplace.
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