April 19, 2017

"US President Donald Trump has methodically pursued most of his campaign promises including those in the trade area. On January 23, 2017, he used his first full weekday in office to sign an executive order pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact. That pact was finalized in 2012-2013 and covered roughly 40 percent of the world’s economy including Japan, Australia, Canada, and the rapidly growing economies of Vietnam and Malaysia. It was favored by many in the US because it was designed to blunt the influence of China in key Asian markets and to gain US exporters access to a number of markets where the US has had difficulty in the past. In addition to action on the TPP, President Trump made 'reciprocal market access' a central point of his overall trade policy in his April 7-8 meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

The TPP could be used as a tool to check China's advances in the funding of its export and infrastructure projects. Between China's recent efforts to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to help finance foreign purchases and the terms which China’s EXIMBANK can offer, US, Japanese, and other Western competitors are at a serious disadvantage in the export finance realm. At another level, there was some thinking that the TPP’s terms could become a template for reforming the current bilateral trade relationship between the US and China. Without question, there is a great deal of criticism of the bilateral trading relationship with China since the US granted China permanent normal trade relations in 2000 following China's accession into the WTO."

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http://www.ippreview.com/index.php/Blog/single/id/409.html 

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