Negotiating trade agreements for the 21st century

This paper was prepared as a stimulant to discussions at the workshop “Negotiating trade agreements for the 21st century: The case of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement”, organized jointly by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the University of Adelaide’s Institute for International Trade (IIT), with the generous financial support of the Australian Government’s Overseas Aid Program (AUSAid). The workshop, held at the ECLAC headquarters in Santiago from 26 to 28 March 2012, brought together experienced trade negotiators from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the eleven member countries of the Arco del Pacífico Latinoamericano group. The paper reviews recent and current developments in regional trade agreements (RTAs), with a special focus on what has been happening in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations and the implications of those negotiations for other 21st Century negotiations, especially as they would pertain to negotiations between Latin American countries and those of the Asia-Pacific region. The paper focuses on a number of regulatory issues (investment, services, intellectual property, labor standards, regulatory coherence, environment, and competition policy) that feature in the agenda of modern trade negotiations.