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At no time in recent history has there been so much activity in the global trade negotiating environment. World trade talks and multiple bilateral and regional trade agreements are all progressing simultaneously. These Closer Economic Partnership Agreements (CEP), also known as Strategic Economic Partnerships (SEP) or Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), are designed to liberalise trade between economies. New Zealand seeks to use its negotiations as a way of underpinning the wider economic and investment relationship as well as opening up opportunities for productive commercial partnerships and other forms of cooperation.
In its bilateral and plurilateral negotiations New Zealand seeks the removal of tariffs on all goods, the liberalisation of services trade and provisions to encourage investment. New Zealand also seeks measures to remove other barriers to trade - such as restrictions on government procurement - and provisions relating to competition policy, intellectual property, e-commerce, labour, environment, and dispute settlement. Given that trade flows can be affected as much by internal regulatory and administrative barriers as by tariffs and quotas, New Zealand also seeks to address ways of facilitating trade through cooperation in areas such as standards and conformance and customs procedures.
Furthermore, New Zealand seeks to harmonise its objectives for trade with the protection of the environment (Framework for Integrating Environment Issues into Free Trade Agreements). New Zealand also seeks to ensure that labour issues are better integrated with trade agreements (Framework for Integrating Labour Issues into Free Trade Agreements).
In sum, New Zealand expects that its agreements will be comprehensive, consistent with World Trade Organisation (WTO) provisions and APEC goals and principles, and open to other economies to join. New Zealand believes that less than comprehensive agreements can pose a threat to multilateral liberalisation by enabling countries to achieve their key market access objectives without liberalising sensitive sectors.
Bilateral and regional free trade agreements play an increasingly important role in international trade. Such agreements are under negotiation by most of our trading partners and have proliferated around the world - particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. It is considered important to ensure that New Zealand is part of this activity thereby enabling it to strengthen economic links and obtain improved access to markets. Moreover, the preferential nature of such agreements means New Zealand exporters might be disadvantaged in markets where other countries have negotiated lower or zero tariffs.
The multilateral WTO process remains the top trade priority for New Zealand because it offers the largest potential gains. But the scale of the negotiations and the interests involved mean that progress may at times be slow. Regional and bilateral trade agreements therefore complement the multilateral track in New Zealand's wider trade strategy. New Zealand also recognises that such agreements with key trading partners can open up important new opportunities for New Zealand exporters and in a shorter timeframe than through the WTO. They enable New Zealand therefore to set a faster pace towards opening markets by linking up with economies that share the same level of ambition. In this way, these agreements can make a useful contribution to generating momentum for the WTO process by highlighting the benefits of liberalisation, and also contribute to achievement of the APEC Bogor Goals of free and open trade and investment within the Asia-Pacific region by 2010 for developed economies, and 2020 for developing economies.
