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02 January 2018

Financial Times: UK looks to join Pacific trade group after Brexit


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Britain has held informal talks about joining a flagship Pacific trade group, in an audacious bid to kick-start exports after Brexit. The proposal would make the UK the first member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that does not border the Pacific Ocean or the South China Sea.


[...] It would help to reinvigorate TPP, a key initiative of Barack Obama’s administration that appeared fatally wounded when Donald Trump withdrew the US last January.

The 11 remaining members, including Australia, Japan and Mexico, agreed in November to continue with a successor deal, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The UK discussions to join the distant trade group that has lost its biggest member come as Mr Fox embarks on a three-day trip to try and woo Chinese business.

Greg Hands, a UK trade minister, said there was no geographical restriction on Britain joining TPP. “Nothing is excluded in all of this,” he told the Financial Times. “With these kind of plurilateral relationships, there doesn’t have to be any geographical restriction.”

However, UK accession would almost certainly have to wait until TPP itself has been revised, and the UK has agreed its post-Brexit relationship with the EU.

The UK’s trade relationship with TPP countries pales in comparison to its existing one with fellow EU members or the US.

Japan, by far the largest economy in the TPP, accounted for just 1.6 per cent of the UK’s goods exports in 2016, according to MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity, which compiles global trade data.

All 11 TPP countries combined accounted for less than 8 per cent of UK goods exported last year while in comparison Germany alone accounted for 11 per cent.

The same applies to UK exports of financial and other services. In the first half of last year the UK exported almost £1.7bn in services to Japan — about a tenth of the £16.6bn that the UK service industries exported to the US. [...]

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)



© Financial Times


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