Ippei Yamazawa
Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University, Japan

Negotiations for three economies’ accession to the TPP have started toward its final stage. While Canada and Mexico will clear additional hurdles of liberalization easily thanks to their membership of NAFTA, Japan is reported to face strong requests by the U.S. and Australia on her liberalization of agricultural products. Nevertheless, all existing members of the TPP negotiation welcome the three economies’ accession in principle since it will increase the scale economy merit of TPP. However, it will never be easy to successfully conclude the TPP negotiation. It is not only in Japan alone that vested-interest groups resist to moves to open economic regime. Requests for exclusion are made in many economies including the U.S. How can we stress them to minimum and achieve a high level of trade and investment liberalization principle. In future we need to incorporate China, Indonesia, and other Asian economies which carry the high growth of the Asia Pacific region. Read more…