Toward CPTPP 2.0

• Trade in the CPTPP region has largely paralleled the members’ trade flows with the rest of the world. The main beneficiary appears to be Vietnam—at least in the sense that after it ratified the CPTPP, Vietnam has notably expanded its trade in goods, and its inbound investment has been solid, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. This can be a positive signal to other Southeast Asian countries that are considering CPTPP membership, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Japan and Singapore have led the region’s trade in digitally deliverable services, also a key sector for potential CPTPP members and services export superstars such as the Philippines, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

• The CPTPP matters for its users: member country firms that export to the CPTPP region find the CPTPP’s market access, services liberalization, and e-commerce provisions beneficial to their businesses. E-commerce provisions are facilitating online sellers: of micro and small online seller-exporters, 73 percent find the provisions of the CPTPP that ensure free data transfer across borders as somewhat or very beneficial, some 66 percent find the CPTPP’s ban on server localization to be beneficial, and 61 percent find the agreement’s liberalizing trade in services to be important. The benefits are even greater for midsize and large firms. Firms also highlight as beneficial the CPTPP’s provisions that commit members to protecting the consumer against unwanted spam and shielding consumers’ privacy.

• The CPTPP has garnered interest and formal applications from several non-members seeking to join an agreement that includes high-quality e-commerce provisions with some of their main trading partners. Especially for some of the Southeast Asian countries, accession to the CPTPP could also help kick-start and lock in domestic digital regulatory reforms. As a major development, both China and Taiwan formally applied to the CPTPP in September.

• Preliminary econometric evidence shows that trade agreements, such as the CPTPP, that have robust and binding e-commerce chapters in addition to goods and services chapters indeed have value in promoting trade in goods and services, as well as digitally deliverable services, among the member countries. Of course, as the number of comprehensive agreements with e-commerce chapters is still small and these agreements are nascent, further research will be needed in the next two to three years to further dissect the value added of digital trade provisions in trade agreements.

• The CPTPP is nascent, and much of its life has been marred by the Covid-19 crisis. At the same time, the agreement could not be timelier, precisely because high-quality e‑commerce provisions help promote small business recovery through e-commerce; surveys time and again show that over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, firms that sell online have outperformed firms that do not sell online.

CPTPP members certainly appear to agree that the agreement’s e-commerce provisions create new value in their trade relations. In its August 2021 meeting, the CPTPP Commission decided to form a Committee on Electronic Commerce to facilitate continued discussion on the implementation and operation of the e-commerce chapter. The new committee is tasked to “position the CPTPP to play a central role in global rulemaking in this field.” The members agreed to assess the CPTPP’s impacts on themselves.

To read the full report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, please click here.