MOSCOW, October 6. /TASS/. Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which has brought into being the largest trading alliance in the world has nothing to do with the freedom of trade and in reality is expected at giving the US a competitive edge, polled experts told TASS.
In his first comments on the just-concluded agreement US President Barack Obama said: ""When more than 95% of our potential customers live outside our borders, we can't let countries like China write the rules of the global economy." Alongside the United States the other members of the TPP are Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. These countries account for 40% of the world economy and a third of world trade. The TPP implies elimination of all duties on goods and services and creation of a free trade zone in the Asia-Pacific Region.
Last November, on the eve of his visit to Beijing Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Trans-Pacific Partnership without Russia and China would be ineffective. And in his address to the 70th UN General Assembly session Putin said a number of countries opted for creating exclusive economic associations closed to outsiders. This is fraught with utter imbalance of the trading system and the fragmentation of the global economic space, he warned.
The chairman of the VTB bank’s observer council, Sergey Dubinin, believes the TPP is being created to cater to the interests of the financial sector in the first place. "The TPP deal will give large corporations and banks a free hand in the Asia-Pacific Region and let feel quite at home," Dubinin said.
"The United States’ prime target in the TPP project is to compensate for its losses in economic competition with China, which has far less costly labour force in contrast with the United States and a major advantage over the US in terms of employees' remuneration expectancy," Dubinin said.
The president of the expert consultancy Neocon, Mikhail Khazin, believes that the TPP agreement is aimed against those who are not affiliated with it, in other words, against economic competitors. "The task of the TPP is to oblige the member-states to delegate their national sovereignty to the trans-national corporations, which would be redistributing financial flows in their favor. In a word, the TPP countries are invited to support the US economy financially. It is not accidental that this enslaving agreement was drafted behind a tight veil of secrecy," Khazin told TASS.
"It is clear to the naked eye that the TPP is aimed in the first place at the key player in the Asia-Pacific Region - China. Those countries which may decide to stay on friendly terms with Beijing will have to brace for Washington’s financial claims. Russia’s share in the APR trade has been moderate for the time being, but as Russia’s economy grows, its conflict with the TPP will be unavoidable," Khazin believes.
And the science doyen of the Higher School of Economics, Russia’s former economics minister, Yevgeny Yasin, believes that China will have no worthy rivals in the near future. "The question is how far Beijing will be prepared to go in liberalizing its own economy. The emergence of the TPP sounds a clear message to Russia to hurry with reforming its own economy. Other countries outside the TPP will put up resistance and work really hard to get more competitive," Yasin told TASS.
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