IT DID not take long for America’s presidential candidates, busy though they must be, to digest the 6,000 pages of the agreement creating the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP). America and 11 other countries of the Pacific Rim struck the trade deal in early October, but the full text was not released until November 5th. Within days Bernie Sanders, a Democrat, had rendered judgment: “It’s even worse than I thought.” Donald Trump, a Republican, labelled it “insanity”.
Even people of a less protectionist bent are unimpressed, complaining that TPP’s short-term benefits will be indetectably modest. One estimate suggests that in its first ten years it will cause its members’ exports of goods and services to rise by just $308 billion in total. In 2003-13 global trade in goods and services grew by more than $1 trillion a year on average. A ten-year horizon misses the point, however. TPP’s real promise lies in the liberalisation of trade in services. Just as it took decades for supply-chain integration to flower into the rapid goods-trade growth of the 1990s and 2000s, the pay-off from TPP, and deals like it, is further off.
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