Beijing-backed free-trade pact to draw up blueprint by year-end
Steps are under way to draft a framework for a proposed free-trade pact that Beijing is championing as a rival bloc to a US-led trade initiative that excludes China.
The Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), encompassing members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) grouping, has received high-profile support from the Beijing leadership.
The study will draw on input from the Apec Business Advisory Council (Abac), with the goal of drawing up a blueprint for the trade pact by the end of this year, according to Doris Ho, the chairwomen of the advisory group comprising private-sector representatives that makes recommendations to the Apec economies.
"It's going to be a whole-year-long study, hopefully shorter," Ho said at a press conference by the council yesterday at the end of a four-day meeting in Hong Kong.
"We're going to get consultants and experts to study all the existing [free trade] agreements," she said.
"We're going to see what are the ones that are really effective. Eventually you take and pick from everybody's experience, and then we end up with a framework hopefully for what the FTAAP would look like. We have to give that in before the end of the year to the leaders."
The FTAAP is seen by some as a rival trade pact to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is being negotiated by the US and 11 other countries, but excludes China.
An Apec leaders summit in Beijing at the end of last year agreed to launch a study into the proposal. President Xi Jinping urged Apec members at the meeting to speed up talks on the trade liberalisation framework, which he described as a "historic step".
Aside from the FTAAP and the TPP, 16 countries including China and the 10 Asean members have been negotiating another free-trade agreement known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This grouping also includes South Korea, Japan, India, New Zealand and Australia.
Ho could not provide a timetable of when the trade pact - sought by Abac since 2004 - might be implemented.
She dismissed any suggestion that the FTAAP would be at odds with the TPP and the RCEP, saying some trade agreements in the region could serve as "building blocks" for the FTAAP.
"We would like to see [the FTAAP] really address some of the future emerging economic and business issues," said Ho, who is the 2015 chairwoman for Abac.
