This study develops a quantitative analysis of the impact of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), as signed on 30 November 2018. The CUSMA represents a major overhaul of the now-dated 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and is based largely on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text, signed in 2016, from which the Trump administration withdrew in January 2017.
Trade Agreements
July 25, 2019
July 3, 2019
The new Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) sets out rules of origin for auto products that need greater clarity to provide certainty for the businesses who must apply them, states a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Bumper to Bumper: Will the CUSMA Rules of Origin Make America’s Auto Industry Great Again?” Jon R. Johnson, a former advisor to the Canadian government during the NAFTA negotiations, takes a deep dive into the arcane rules of origin that will determine whether a good is eligible for duty-free treatment and finds they are still unclear in many cases, more stringent than those in NAFTA, and needlessly complex.
July 1, 2019
This paper presents how the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) has evolved as an institution, the changes it has undergone, and the challenges it has faced for the past decades. More importantly, this paper tries to enumerate the roles of APEC in positioning the Philippines in the global economy.
June 25, 2019
The Trump administration has pursued a sharply different – and for its trade partners unsettling – trade policy from that followed by all previous American administrations in the postwar period. While much attention has been focused on the oftentimes contradictory, oftentimes theoretically unfounded, and oftentimes undiplomatically aggressive manner in which that policy has been implemented, Dan Ciuriak argues the policy contains a coherent if not necessarily desirable or achievable vision for the US economy. Furthermore, he reviews how this policy is implemented in the USMCA, and on the implications of the agreement for the future of the North American economies – as distinct from the North American economy as a whole.
June 1, 2019
As parties to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Canada and Mexico have agreed to adopt important intellectual property protections for biologic medicines. Most significantly, both countries have agreed to increase the term of regulatory data protection (RDP) for new biologic medicines to ten years, thereby approaching the 12 years provided by the United States. Currently, Canada provides an eight-year term, while Mexico offers no protection.
May 3, 2019
Following a long period of unprecedented growth in international trade, the world trading system is currently facing considerable headwinds.
May 1, 2019
In particular, this paper focuses on Chapter 20 of USMCA, which contains the intellectual property (IP) provisions. Vocal critics in Canada have claimed that Chapter 20 will add billions of dollars to our health care costs, limit creativity, and unfairly constrain online platforms. The paper addresses each of these.
March 19, 2019
Amid United States Trade Representative (USTR) opaqueness and a lack of details in recent congressional testimony, the Trump Administration’s 2020 budget proposal, released in March, provides some indications about what to expect following two years of tumultuous American trade policy.
February 7, 2019
Washington’s trade and economic policy establishment has largely turned a blind eye toward Chinese innovation mercantilist practices, perversely arguing either that China’s outlaw behavior helped the U.S. economy by keeping prices low or that the effects were inconsequential.
January 1, 2019
The CPTPP is the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was the original free trade agreement (FTA) between the United States and the 11 members of the CPTPP. The TPP was an ambitious FTA that had been negotiated for almost a decade under US leadership during the time of the Obama administration. Not only was the agreement broad, covering two-fifths of the world economy, it was also comprised of 30 chapters that covered areas from tariff reductions to labour standards and intellectual property rights. The concluded TPP Agreement was signed in New Zealand in February 2016 by all 12 countries.