Negotiating T-TIP – Key Issues and Potential Implications for the Third Countries

T-TIP is a currently negotiated bilateral agreement between the European Union and the United Stated of America. In the eventuality of concluding the agreement, there are expected considerable gains for both of the involved economies, but also for the current trade partners of both negotiators i.e. third countries. Literature and also studies performed in the name of the European Commission try to quantify these effects on a global scale, by taking into consideration the consequences of the largest bilateral agreement ever concluded, on the multilateral system. Unanimously, authors agree that among third countries, the most unaffected will be the producers of raw materials and industrial supplies, since they are very hard or impossible to replace with similar feedstocks. In a globalized economy, by choosing regionalism in the detriment of multilateralism through not accepting the accession of other parties into the T-TIP negotiations, both EU and US risk to be marginalized from the world trade system by the multilateral agreements that the main emerging economies will be forced to accede to.