Foreign officials, media highlight signing of RCEP
Berlin (VNA) – Minister
for Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany Peter Altmaier has welcomed the
signing of the Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement between 15 signatories in
Asia-Pacific.
The trade agreement is
an important contribution to free and rules-based world trade, he said on
November 16, adding that the EU has already concluded its own free trade pacts
with Japan, the Republic of Korea (RoK), Singapore and Vietnam and is working
hard to conclude an investment agreement with China.
Meanwhile, foreign policy spokesman
for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Jürgen Hardt,
called on the European Union (EU) to push ahead with its own agreement.
The RCEP agreement is a wake-up call for the EU, he added.
In a statement, Hardt underlined that the conclusion of the RCEP agreement in Asia creates another trade power centre without Europe and the US.
The EU can no longer afford to put free trade negotiations on the back burner, because other nations will set the standards and Europeans will fall behind, he said.
German media also highlighted the signing of the trade agreement, saying it will bolster economic integration in Asia-Pacific and stand up to trade protectionism.
An article of Neues
Deutschland newspaper commented that the century of Asia has come following the
signing of the RCEP agreement.
Asia’s intra-regional
trade is projected to lure the global economy’s core to the continent, it
continued.
The Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper quoted Dr Jeffrey Wilson, a Research
Director at the Perth USAsia Centre in Australia, as saying that the RCEP
agreement will be the most important regional trade agreement ever signed since
the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1994 and projected to
change the region’s economic and strategic maps.
The RCEP agreement sets an
example for countries to overcome political differences and reduce trade
barriers in pursuit of developmental benefits, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, chairman
of the Kuhn Foundation, said.
The US expert said
what makes RCEP especially noteworthy is that even though member states have
extraneous political differences, they all view anticipated economic gain of
multilateralism as sufficiently motivating to overcome such differences. All
should root for RCEP's success, he noted.
The trade pact was
formally signed on November 15 within the framework of the recent 37th ASEAN
Summit and Related Summits hosted by Vietnam, after eight years of negotiation.
The RCEP agreement is
the largest free trade agreement (FTA) in the world, covering a market of 2.2
billion people, or almost 30 percent of the world's population, with a combined
gross domestic product (GDP) of 26.2 trillion US dollars or about 30 percent of
global GDP.
It includes 10 ASEAN
members, namely Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and the bloc's five FTA partners
of China, Japan, the RoK, Australia and New Zealand./.