New issues in the roadmap for economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region and trade and investment liberalization

2016 started off well with 12 countries officially signing and completing negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The Brexit event marked a strong increase in heterodox ideology, populism, protectionism, and nationalist individuals and groups. This trend is also shown through elections in Europe and some countries in the region, raising alarm bells for governments about the need to effectively communicate the role and benefits of innovation and remove barriers.

Due to the importance of maintaining trade and investment liberalization for maximizing domestic economic growth as well as the economic growth of the entire region, while strengthening the global economic situation, Asia-Pacific countries cannot help but support policies of international and regional economic integration. The recent APEC Summit and ASEAN Ministerial Meeting mentioned these points clearly. As the host country of APEC 2017, Vietnam needs to promote an ambitious agenda that reflects the views of economies in the region. Ongoing regional trade liberalization could spur significant growth in Southeast Asia, especially in the foreign trade sector.services and a number of other fields such as transportation, infrastructure, education, and investment.

According to the discussion, each country needs to commit to and implement structural and macroeconomic reforms, streamline procedures, eliminate and cut unnecessary procedures to support productivity, promote competition, enhance trade and investment opportunities, as well as business activities. At the same time, find useful solutions to communicate effectively and convincingly to social groups and industries in countries who feel left out or disadvantaged by globalization and liberalization.

New issues of regional trade and investment liberalization

The rapid development of transportation and information technology has enhanced connectivity between Asia-Pacific economies, and intra-regional movement of goods, services and tourism has increased significantly in the past few decades. At the cross-border macro level, outstanding regional cooperation policies have been formed (the expanded Mekong region, forming the expanded Yellow Sea economic region).

Supply chains and production fragmentation are both reinforced and increased by geographical distance and available resources in each country to strengthen closer cross-border economic connections. Participation in global value chains benefits member economies more than countries that only participate in international trade in final goods. A standard global value chain includes a series of production stages, from upstream prototype products to midstream assembly and branding to downstream marketing.

The integration processes have had important changes in both form and substance, reflected in increasing trade interdependence and cross-border investment flows through a series of FTAs ​​and intra-regional cooperation policies. Economic integration includes harmonizing economic policies through partial or complete removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, investment and movement of factors across borders. To strengthen and promote deep economic integration, economic communities will naturally gradually develop into political alliances.

The paper proposes another direction when TPP and the Regional and Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are facing difficulties, which is to initiate a proposal for an agreement with higher standards, "TPP minus", for example, taking advantage of the already negotiated TPP as a common framework, adding a number of other member countries./.