TPP’s Commission and Committees

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.