China-Australia relations: ‘don’t expect RCEP to solve trade dispute’
- The main function of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, the world’s biggest free-trade agreement, is to drive new business
- But if the years of talks already involved in reaching the deal have not reduced conflicts, signing the deal is unlikely to make a difference, observer says
The signing of the world’s biggest free-trade agreement has the potential to spur China and Australia towards resolving their escalating trade conflict but is unlikely to directly result in a settlement, analysts and trade lawyers said.
But hopes that the RCEP could cool tensions between the two trading partners may not be realistic.
“The institutional structures set up along with the liberalisation commitments in the RCEP will provide an additional forum to negotiate on matters of common interest and to resolve the inevitable disagreements about technical trade issues,” said Brett Williams, principal at the Williams Trade Law firm.
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RCEP: 15 Asia-Pacific countries sign world’s largest free-trade deal
But others were less sanguine about the untested dispute mechanism within the RCEP, with the agreement’s main function to stimulate new trade between the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.