gtreview.com ASIA / 18-04-23 / BY ELEANOR WRAGG
As the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) machine whirrs into life and trade flows within the bloc increase, could its paucity of explicit ESG provisions lead to a lowering of sustainability ambitions for trade? Eleanor Wragg reports.
Just over a year has passed since RCEP, the world’s largest trade agreement, came into force. Covering a third of the world’s population and linking together least developed countries (LDCs) such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar to wealthier nations like Australia, China, South Korea and Japan, the deal promises to inject new impetus into regional integration and cement the position of ‘Factory Asia’ at the centre of the world’s supply chains.
The well-documented linkages between trade liberalisation and increased productivity, wages and employment could help some of RCEP’s poorest countries inch closer to achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1 – no poverty, and 8 – decent work and economic growth.
However, unlike most recent preferential trade pacts, RCEP does not contain provisions on topics such as the environment or labour rights, raising questions about the extent to which it balances economic interest with social and environmental protections.
A shot in the arm for Asian trade
Thrashed out over eight long years of painstaking negotiations between the 10 Asean member states, Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea as well as India – which walked away from talks before they were finalised – RCEP streamlines the tangled web of bilateral trade agreements among its signatories into a bumper megadeal that spans 510 pages of agreement text and thousands upon thousands of pages of associated schedules.
Tổng thống đắc cử Donald Trump cam kết rút Mỹ khỏi TPP ngay ngày đầu tiên nhậm chức – một động thái được coi là nhường đường cho Trung Quốc. Ảnh: breakingnewslive.net
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