INSIDE GLOBAL ISSUES
Policy Brief No. 201538
TPP: Where Does It Come from and Where Does It Go?
Zhang Lin
TPP is a regional cooperative treaty signed by several countries under the framework of APEC and was originated from the bilateral Closer Economic Partnership (CEP) between Singapore and New Zealand. At APEC Leadership Summit in Mexico in 2002, leaders of Chile, Singapore and New Zealand announced P3-Closer Economic Partnership (P3-CEP) talks. In 2005, Brunei officially joined the 3rd round P3-CEP negotiation. In July of the same year, the four countries signed the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership as Pacific-4 (P4), which took effect in December 2006.
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It took five years and 20 rounds of negotiations, several ministerial conferences and the first trade ministerial conference to shape up TPP. Among them, there were 4 rounds of negotiations in 2010, 6 in 2011, 5 in 2012, 6 in 2013, and 2 rounds of ministerial negotiations and 1 Chief Negotiators’ Conference in 2014. The final agreement was reached at the ministerial conference in 2015 (See Table 1). It was indeed full of twists and turns.
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