Shanker Singham, Jul 29, 2013
The close on July 12th of the first round of negotiations under the auspices of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“T-TIP”) offers an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities presented by this historic agreement. The T-TIP offers a promising opportunity for both the United States and the European Union to maximize their competitive environments and improve consumer welfare through eliminating anticompetitive market distortions (“ACMDs”). These regulatory distortions are imposed by governments (or by the private sector, with government support) to give an artificial advantage to particular businesses or industries. ACMDs stifle growth and impose hidden economic and competitive costs. U.S. and EU negotiators should take advantage of the opportunity provided by the T-TIP to harmonize the two economies’ regulatory promulgation processes.
It is in the regulatory area that trade and competition policy converge, and maximizing this convergence to generate non-zero sum growth will be the yardstick by which this agreement is ultimately measured. The T-TIP represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the United States and the European Union, which jointly represent the “backbone” of the global economy, to unleash the forces of competition by taking the trade negotiations to a new level of depth and substance through provisions that meaningfully reduce ACMDs. A U.S.-EU trade agreement that truly eliminated these anticompetitive distortions would generate trillions of dollars of new wealth in the global economy.
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