By Fredrik Erixon, director and cofounder of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), a world-economy think tank based in Brussels, and was the Convenor of the Transatlantic Task Force on Trade, a joint project of ECIPE and the German Marshall Fund of the US that spearheaded the TTIP negotiations. A fuller version of his analysis can be found here (PDF).
Failures in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round have prompted countries to turn to preferential trade agreements. But are they worth their salt? While the most outstanding feature of past FTAs is that they have not had impressive effects on growth in trade and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) may change this verdict. Clearly, TTIP will be won or lost for its economic merits. And the pro-growth effects of TTIP are really what persuaded reluctant officials and politicians in Europe to join countries like Germany and Sweden in their efforts to push for a transatlantic FTA. Given Europe’s poor growth rates, trade agreements that could deliver higher economic growth have been given a new hearing.
Few would deny that TTIP has the capacity to deliver a sizeable contribution to GDP in Europe. The gains from this FTA would be bigger than from other FTAs for the reason that it involves two large economies. Simply, size matters. A “conservative” estimate by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London suggests the TTIP gain for the EU to be in the tune of 0.3-0.5 percent of GDP (the GDP gains are slightly smaller for the US).
However, political scepticism of TTIP is less concerned with the bilateral economic gains (or losses) and more directed to its consequences on the World Trade Organisation as the central forum of trade negotiations. But perhaps surprisingly to some, the debate in Europe over TTIP has taken a different view. Generally, it has not thrived on the notion that TTIP should be an attempt to build a Fortress Atlantic – or that it is a strategy to gang up on China or other emerging powers competing with the US and Europe.
So while the strange acronym of TTIP is for some a code word for the death knell of the WTO, many trade observers in Europe would argue it is the substance that should be used to give global trade policy a needed shot in the arm.
TTIP, like the TPP, was not born out of deep and genuine beliefs in the principles of free markets or the classical school of free trade. Like any other trade agreement in the past years, these initiatives build on conditional views of free trade and free competition mixed up with soft mercantilism and a growing urgency to support economic growth. Yet it is the best available strategy to rejuvenate global efforts to liberalise trade.
In the past 15 years, the multilateral trading system has been a leaderless system with no clear direction that has unified the key members. The system itself benefited for several decades from the leadership by the United States, which considered this system to be critical for its overall strategic objective of spreading market-based capitalism. There were willing followers to the US leadership, but none other than the US had the requisite economic, political, and institutional capacity to underwrite the system. Yet since the collapse of the Cold War, American leadership has withered away, and its general position on trade liberalisation has somewhat changed. Absent political leadership and direction, the Doha Round got stuck because the political instinct of many countries was to favour status quo rather than new liberalisation as long as there is no external pressure that prompts them to revisit that position.
Like many other things in economic life, trade liberalisation tends to be driven by two motives: profits and fear. Countries agree to open up for greater foreign competition because they believe it will boost their economy or because they fear that other countries will go ahead without them if they stubbornly resist liberalisation. Despite all the success of trade-oriented models of growth, many countries have grown to think that they will not stand to benefit much from new trade liberalisation – and that they have no reason to fear failure.
TTIP may partly change this. It is a big initiative. And if the two biggest economies of the world go for a bilateral agreement, it means that there is a risk for other countries that stand outside that bilateral agreement and, which is important, other efforts to liberalise trade. That risk is mostly about not having a voice in the design of the trade reforms that are likely to serve as benchmarks in future international agreements. It is far less about loosing current trade access – but it is about the fear of not having as good access to trade that will be liberalised in the future. Consequently, if TTIP is the ‘real thing,’ if it achieves the promise of ushering the world into 21st Century trade policy, the response from the larger emerging economies cannot be no response at all. The political and economic opportunity costs of status quo would have been changed.
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