“We welcome Saturday’s announcement and the intensive bilateral consultation that has occurred in the past months between the United States and Japan on a range of seemingly intractable issues,” said NFTC Vice President for Regional Trade Initiatives Chuck Dittrich. “Skepticism over making meaningful progress on a range of key agricultural, manufacturing and services trade and investment barriers now has the potential to give way to real progress, which, in turn, will give greater economic meaning to the TPP.”
“The recent U.S. announcement that its support for Japan entering the TPP negotiations will take place alongside parallel intensive bilateral negotiations of non-tariff measures addressing insurance, autos, transparency investment, IPR, standards, government procurement, competition policy, express delivery and SPS underscores the complexity of opening the Japanese market, but also suggests there is a real window of opportunity to do so,” Dittrich continued. “This parallel process will need to yield concrete positive results to facilitate both conclusion of the TPP and favorable action by Congress to approve the agreement.”
“One of the issues not discussed in the bilateral talks, or in the TPP negotiations, has been the growing concern over policy measures designed to affect exchange rate relationships to alter global terms of trade,” said NFTC President Bill Reinsch. “While the United States has been accused of this because of its quantitative easing policy, U.S. policy has been aimed at stimulating domestic demand – a necessity in view of the global recession and welcomed by our trading partners. Other nations have been guilty of actions that effectively transfer the costs of their growth to other countries. This is a growing global problem that is beyond the capacity of the TPP talks to address, but it must eventually be dealt with, either in the IMF or the WTO, or both.”
“Robust engagement is the only way to increase economic benefits of global trade and investment, and the NFTC welcomes Saturday’s news as a step in the right direction. We will continue working with our member companies and the U.S. government to address the broad range of issues with all the parties to the negotiations,” Reinsch concluded.
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About the NFTC
Advancing Global Commerce for Nearly A Century- The National Foreign Trade Council (www.nftc.org) is a leading business organization advocating an open, rules- based global trading system. Founded in 1914 by a broad-based group of American companies, the NFTC now serves hundreds of member companies through its offices in Washington and New York.
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