Trans-Pacific partnership agreement (full text)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement (FTA) that will liberalise trade and investment between 12 Pacific-rim countries: New Zealand, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Viet Nam. As the Depositary of the TPP Agreement, the New Zealand Government has now made the full text of the agreement available to the public.   Trans-Pacific Partnership Ministers’ Statement We, the trade ministers of Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam, are pleased to announce that we have successfully concluded the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After more than five years of intensive negotiations, we have come to an agreement that will support jobs, drive sustainable growth, foster inclusive development, and promote innovation across the Asia-Pacific region. Most importantly, the agreement achieves the goal we set forth of an ambitious, comprehensive, high standard and balanced agreement that will benefit our nation’s citizens. TPP brings higher standards to nearly 40 percent of the global economy. In addition to liberalizing trade and investment between us, the agreement addresses the challenges our stakeholders face in the 21st century, while taking into account the diversity of our levels of development. We expect this historic agreement to promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and to promote transparency, good governance, and strong labor and environmental protections. To formalize the outcomes of the agreement, negotiators will continue technical work to prepare a complete text for public release, including the legal review, translation, and drafting and verification of the text. We look forward to engaging with stakeholders on the specific features of this agreement and undergoing the domestic processes to put the agreement in place

The Impact of Investment Arbitration on Investment Treaty Design: Myth Versus Reality

Investor-state arbitration (ISA) has shaped the practice, scholarship and teaching of international investment law, but to what extent has it shaped its substance? According to anecdotal evidence, states change their investment treaties in response to developments in investment arbitration. To separate myth from reality this article empirically investigates the effect of investment arbitration on treaty making through three impact channels: (1) investment clauses, (2) investment claims and (3) investment case law coding close to 1700 international investment agreements (IIA) across 55 clauses. Our analysis sheds new light on several normative debates within the field. First, we find that the omission or inclusion of investment clauses has no material effect on other treaty design elements. This suggests that ISA clauses are procedural add-ons, which bestow investors with enforcement rights, but do not alter the inter-state nature of the treaties’ substantive obligations. Second, contrary to prior anecdotal and empirical evidence, investment claims do not lead to systematic treaty design changes. Most innovation attributed to investment claims actually pre-dates them. Moreover, only in few countries did investment claims trigger treaty design changes. Hence, rather than worrying about overzealous responses by states to “rebalance” IIAs in the face of investment claims, we should be concerned about the field’s path-dependency and its entrenchment in a pre-arbitration architecture. Third, investment case law exerts the strongest impact on treaty making as controversial interpretive outcomes in investment arbitration trigger traceable changes in treaty design. Hence, states are more active in fine-tuning existing commitments than in designing new ones further entrenching IIAs’ path dependency and lack of innovation