DOF: PH more open to RCEP

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Duterte administration is more open to joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) to improve trade and investment, the Department of Finance (DOF) said.

"I personally would like to look at RCEP closely because that’s the 10 ASEAN countries, I think. That one, we are more open to,” said Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III.

The RCEP is the proposed 16-nation free trade area comprising the 10 ASEAN member-nations— the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam— and its six trading partners China, South Korea, Australia, India, Japan and New Zeal and.

Before this year’s Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru, trade ministers from the 16 countries comprising the RCEP met on Nov. 3-4, in Cebu City and discussed a wide range of issues, including the proposal to remove or drastically reduce duties on a number of goods traded across the region.

Dominguez said the head of the delegation of the European Union to the Philippines has also mentioned a possible free trade agreement between the EU and the Philippines “and we will look at that and give that our priority attention.”

He said that because the Duterte administration is a new one, it wants to thoroughly study these proposed free trade arrangements.

“So we have to think about [ these] very carefully, we are a new administration, we want to see the pros and cons, we want to see how we will benefit,” Dominguez said.

The RCEP was conceptualized about a decade ago but was launched only in November 2012.

Its membership of 15 Asian countries account for almost half of the world’s population, almost 30 percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and over a quarter of the world’s exports.

In terms of merchandise exports, RCEP is larger than the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), as China’s exports of $2.3 trillion alone as of 2014 are larger than the combined exports of the US ($1.6 trillion) and Canada ($474 billion), the two lead members of the TPP.

The RCEP covers trade in goods and services, investment, economic and technical cooperation, intellectual property rights, competition policy, and dispute settlement, among other i ssu es.

It does not cover labor, environment and state-owned enterprises.