Inside Out | More multi-country trade deals and fewer bilaterals, please
For many companies in an economy like Hong Kong, bilateral agreements are simply ignored
Last week, as most Hong Kong people were focused on the ostentatious pomp of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 20th anniversary visit, the inauguration of Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s new government, and an awful lot of fireworks and scarlet bunting, a tiny delegation from Australia quietly arrived to launch landmark discussions on a free-trade agreement.
Smarting from the recent assassination by US President Donald Trump of the 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership, lead negotiator Elizabeth Ward and her team are clearly keen to keep the trade liberalising bicycle from falling over – and where easier than hyper-liberal Hong Kong?
But Hong Kong is a bit of a “newby” to free-trade agreements. For most of the past four decades, our administration has been among the world’s most passionate advocates for multilateralism, and so has focused all trade guns on the World Trade Organisation and the helplessly stalled Doha Round.
Where we have deviated from the reasonable but purist view that multilateralism is best, it has been for China (through the 2003 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), for the massive plurilateral Trade in Services Agreement still under negotiation in Geneva on the margins of the WTO, and for a belated back-door scramble into the China-Asean Free Trade Area.
This latter deal, which Hong Kong should really have been in from the start, is still not agreed, though our trade negotiators have been telling us a deal is imminent for about a year now. The latest target is late 2017, perhaps to coincide with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ 50th anniversary leaders’ meeting in the Philippines in November.