Articles on trade negotiations are the usual fare of JCA as we have tended to avoid the alphabet soup articles that discuss these trade deals. However, because of the potential significance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership being enthusiastically promoted by the US and other capitalist governments, we felt that the Commentary “Mega-Regional Trade Deals in the Asia-Pacific: Choosing Between the TPP and RCEP?“, by Jeffrey D. Wilson was and important contribution.
Wilson, who is from the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, writes of “mega-regional” trade agreements as recently the “most significant trade policy issue in the Asia-Pacific.” He refers to “the United States-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP),” and their “competing visions for how the Asia-Pacific trade system should evolve…”.