Risks and rewards for Hong Kong as the TPP unfolds
Updated: 2015-11-13 09:52
By Gabriel Donleavy(HK Edition)
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We now know everything that is in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreed last month between the US, Japan and 12 other nations. We know that tariff barriers on vehicles, auto parts, food and many raw materials will be significantly lowered between the signatory nations. We do know that the agreement extends the life of patents to 8 years on drugs, though the US pharmaceutical companies wanted 12 and some of the signatory nations have much shorter periods of protection than that. We do know that a major issue in much of the Western press is the new ability of corporations to sue signatory governments in tribunals set up under the World Bank for perceived frustration of the corporations' expectations - originally a safeguard against arbitrary expropriation and rule changes but now a possible threat to national sovereignty. Now that the whole text of the treaty is published, the fears of those threatened by what they thought was in the TPP are confirmed in the cold light of the truth.
The Hong Kong SAR is an international hub facilitating world trade, offering high-end business expertise, connectivity and a unique bridge between the US and the Chinese mainland that no other place, including signatory Singapore, can match. It is not threatened by the possible migration of low-skill jobs from the richer signatories to the poorer ones as trade liberalizes. In fact, Hong Kong has many companies with the skill and contacts to broker and manage such transfers efficiently and effectively. Vietnam is likely to be the main recipient of such jobs and the engagement of the SAR with the Socialist Republic is long, deep and multi-faceted.
In the West, the business community tends to prefer trade disputes to be resolved in courts rather than in arbitration tribunals or through mediation, while in the East arbitration has had higher status and greater use in dispute resolution. Accordingly the new supranational tribunals that some in the West see as a threat may be seen in the East as a sensible recognition that trade and courts do not mix well.
When Australia introduced compulsory plain packaging of cigarette packets a few years ago, this reduced sales and profits of tobacco companies there and that in turn occasioned one of the companies to sue the Australian government under a clause in the Australia-Hong Kong agreement. The clause is probably similar to the not yet public one in the TPP. There is a certain natural justice in companies holding governments to account when they unilaterally change the trading conditions. Some may say, however, that any company operating in a new country is a corporate citizen of the new country and therefore cannot have rights above and beyond those accorded to other citizens. Such privileging of the foreign corporation is not, for such commentators, a matter of trade becoming freer but rather a matter of retreating to mercantilism. Mercantilism is the name for the international economic system of the pre-industrial but fully colonial era, when Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and then England and France licensed their corporations to impose their will on newly conquered colonies. Mercantilism, as the name suggests, is rule by merchants. It is not capitalism. It is not free trade. Free trade is an ideal state of no tariffs, no restrictions on the international movement of capital, material or people, and no differential taxation of domestic as opposed to foreign supplies. The TPP ticks the box for tariff reduction, half ticks it for de-restriction of free movement, but no more than that.
Humanity has the United Nations (UN) and the UN has the World Trade Organization (WTO). World government is not, however, within the grasp of the UN for the foreseeable future. Nations have slowly moved toward federated unions like the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Gulf Cooperation Council and now China's "Belt and Road", a new Silk Road confederation, to pursue their national economic interests. One day there may be world government and the WTO may regulate world trade in the global public interest. Until then, any new agreement, partnership, treaty or grouping in economic affairs is likely to be a mix of national and mercantilist interests being advanced. It is wise and sensible for countries outside of any new agreement to stay outside until they see if their own interests are served well by joining the agreement. What China has said of its "Belt and Road" vision has a developmental aspect missing from the TPP, and it is facile to see the TPP and "Belt and Road" initiatives as either free trade projects or as mercantilist trading blocks around contending superpower hubs. They represent contrasting visions of economic leadership. Between these visions entente is not only possible but is the natural equilibrium state.
The author is professor of accounting in the New England Business School at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.
(HK Edition 11/13/2015 page13)