RCEP documents the central importance of the ASEAN community`s fundamental contribution to the agreement it initiated and led. The immediate reason for the negotiations was the consolidation of the existing framework of the “ASEAN+1 Free Trade Agreement” by involving all relevant parties in an agreement. Therefore, RCEP should not be seen as a deep and ambitious trade agreement. Agreed standards – for example, on intellectual property rights, services, investment and trade-related free movement of people – are consistently low and lack vision for the future. Nevertheless, it is precisely this low ambition that has made it possible to involve developing countries, which have also been granted individualized extended transition periods and differentiated adjustments. This approach was in line with ASEAN`s aspirations and objectives of uniting the States of the Indo-Pacific region in a broad area of open trade and investment that promotes economic integration, growth and development while integrating the less developed States and countering the perceived conflicting trends of the former Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The signing of the agreement does not mark the end of the negotiations. RCEP should be open to accession by third countries, in particular India, which withdrew from the agreement at the last moment. Further development of the content of the agreement is also foreseen. This is to be expected, as we know in the past that ASEAN trade agreements start weakly, but are then gradually improved and modernised. It is envisaged that an RCEP secretariat, which has not yet been established, will ensure that the agreement is continuously adapted and developed. The CPTPP is also about to expand.
Many countries have expressed interest in accession, including the United Kingdom, Colombia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and even the People`s Republic of China. The sequence of future enlargements will largely determine how the CPTPP positions itself in the areas of trade and geopolitics. RCEP, often mistakenly called “China-led,” is a triumph of ASEAN middle-power diplomacy. The value of a major trade deal with East Asia has long been recognized, but neither China nor Japan, the region`s largest economies, were politically acceptable as architects of the project. The impasse was resolved in 2012 by an ASEAN-brokered agreement that included India, Australia and New Zealand as members and gave ASEAN responsibility for negotiating the agreement. Without such an “ASEAN centrality”, RCEP might never have been launched. In trade and external relations between the EU and China, the two sides pursue similar interests that overlap in most areas. Given that broad regulatory convergence already exists (or has been achieved through individual free trade agreements), cooperation with the CPTPP would also improve the chances of EU standards being applied globally. Finally, a Euro-Indo-Pacific partnership would also be important if you look at the United States. This could help counter the recurring trend of protectionism and unilateralism in America with a much more convincing and assertive power. Figure 1: Selected regional trade agreements by economic size (share of world GDP) (i) Value-added rule (i.e. the need for goods accounts for more than a certain percentage of the share of regional value; e.B 40%) A product manufactured in Indonesia containing Australian parts, for example, could be subject to tariffs elsewhere in the ASEAN Free Trade Area.
The tariff reductions provided for in the agreement mainly concern industrial products, which are less agricultural. While ASEAN countries are barely reducing their already low bilateral external tariffs, China`s (and to a lesser extent South Korea`s) tariff cuts on Japan are quite substantial. This has led some observers in Japan to even refer to RCEP as the “Sino-Japanese Free Trade Agreement”. A huge trading intermediary will manifest itself in the uniform application of the relatively easy-to-use ASEAN rules of origin, which prove that only goods from the RCEP Free Trade Area, but not from third countries, benefit from duty relief. In addition to the ASEAN Free Trade Area (FTA) among ASEAN member states, the regional trading bloc has signed several free trade agreements with some of the major economies in the Asia-Pacific region. These include the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand FTA (AANZFTA), the ASEAN-China FTA (ACFTA), the ASEAN-India FTA (AIFTA), the ASEAN-Korea FTA (AKFTA) and the ASEAN-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership (AJCEP). The objective of these free trade agreements is to encourage and encourage companies of all sizes in ASEAN to trade regionally and internationally without tariff barriers. .