Akhila asked: What is Trans-Pacific Partnership? How is it important to India?

Rukmani Gupta replies: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (or the TPP as it is generally known) is a free-trade agreement being negotiated between 11 countries of the Pacific rim including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States of America and Vietnam. Japan is the 12th country that has entered into the negotiations to join the TPP. The US administration under President Barack Obama seems to have prioritised the TPP as the economic component of its "rebalancing" to Asia strategy.

Some have suggested that the TPP would compete with existing and proposed free trade arrangements in Asia and pose a challenge to the economic unity between the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states since some of them are members of the TPP and, moreover, the ASEAN itself is involved in negotiating a large trade agreement – the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or the RCEP. The RCEP involves negotiations between 16 countries - the 10 members of the ASEAN and six regional partners (India, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand).

There is clearly an overlap in the membership of these two trade agreements. However, this does not necessarily imply that the goals of the two agreements are antagonistic. The TPP seeks to vastly reduce tariff levels among member countries and standardise policies on various issues including safeguarding intellectual property rights. The ambit of the RCEP is not quite as vast. The two can therefore be seen as different rungs on a free-trade agreement ladder. Although some American officials have stated that the US would welcome India’s participation in the TPP, India has not made any official statement on the issue suggesting such a move. It may be reasonable to expect that it will take some time before India would be amenable to joining a trade agreement such as the TPP, whose scope extends well beyond other trade agreements India has partnered in.