TPP’s Commission and Committees
Written by Li-Chang Kuo
TPP
(Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) established the committees of ‘Environment,
Cooperation and Capacity Building, Competitiveness and Business Facilitation, Development,
Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises, and Regulatory Coherence’ for attaining
the mission goal of TPP. Meanwhile, The Parties also established ‘TPP
Commission’ in the Chapter 27 ‘Administrative and Institutional Provisions’, composed
of Ministers or senior level officials, to oversee the implementation or operation
of the Agreement and guide its future evolution. This Commission will review the
economic relationship and partnership among the Parties on a periodic basis to ensure
that the Agreement remains relevant to the trade and investment challenges confronting
the Parties. This Commission will also require that each party to appoint an
overall contact point to facilitate the communication among the parties, and
create a mechanism through the grace period to move forward the implementation
of the obligations and the tasks, and ensure that a relatively large transparency
can be accomplished.
There’re
12 countries participated the first round in TPP, they’re all the member
economies of APEC, included north America’s USA, Canada and Mexico, south
America’s Peru and Chile, North-east Asia’s Japan, South-east Asia’s Singapore,
Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam, and Australia and New Zealand in the Southern
Hemisphere. In order to enhance the legal constraints of APEC, Singapore , Brunei ,
Chile and New Zealand initiated the TPP, and I received the
information at APEC 2006 CEO Summit in Hanoi ,
Vietnam , and immediately
conveyed this information to the top officials. After Barack Obama took the
office, America
started dominating the negotiations of TPP, and made many efforts to achieve this
multilateral free trade agreement; consequently, TPP as a derivative organization
of APEC. The difference is ‘TPP is a high standard agreement’—the parties must comply
with the rules and provisions of 30 chapters. On the contrary, APEC may not
necessarily fulfill the commitments—even the Leaders’ Declarations, the case of
‘Administrative Committee’ was an example.
Recall
that APEC 2003, Australia government found out that a big issue of ‘Imbalanced
Development’ was rising in the Asia-Pacific region, so self-fund
held the forum ‘Growing the APEC SME Exporter Community II:
Business Perspective’ for addressing the needs of SME exporters,
and invited the economic thinkers to share the best practice experiences, and Linda
Din, the Founder of Panhornic ComMec Holding Co. (PCH was located in San Jose,
California) won the best practice of strengthening the economic society. Linda’s
proposal pointed out a ‘Operation Chart’ which operated by a ‘Administration Committee’
to run the 6 centers such as Financial, IPR & Law, ICT, HR, Mfg and Supply
Chain for resolving the problems of SMEs; and the Ministers Joint Statement
required that “Ministers commended Australia for its series of self-funded
seminars in 2003 on ‘Growing the APEC SME Exporter Community’, which provided
an opportunity for member economies to gain a greater appreciation from APEC
small businesses, small business associations and industry groups of their
views on how APEC could tackle the important issue of identifying and reducing impediments
to trade for regional small businesses. Ministers encouraged all member
economies to co-operate and actively participate in the project.” But some representatives
of the economies simply desired for their personal interests, enlarging the
problem of imbalanced development in the region. Now, the Commission and
Committees of TPP will turn over the improper measures, correct the direction
of developing the economy.