The new US administration threatens to give immediate notification of its withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement upon inauguration in January 2017. The agreement was expected to be signed in November 2016 and ratified over the next two years, but given the administration change, the Obama administration refrained from signing and seeking to pass it through congress.
The TPP agreement has been ongoing since 2008 and includes Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The TPP was hailed as a desirable agreement by the Obama administration as it would establish trade-related disciplines that strengthen and harmonize regulations, increase certainty, and decrease trade costs for firms that trade and invest in the TPP region. Interested parties particularly emphasized the importance of TPP chapters addressing intellectual property rights, customs and trade facilitation, investment, technical barriers to trade, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, and state-owned enterprises.
Those opposed to the agreement including the United Steel Workers Union noted a US International Trade Commission (ITC) May 2016 report that noted that the manufacturing, natural resources, and energy sectors would be $10.8 billion (0.1 percent) lower with the TPP Agreement than they would be compared with baseline estimates without the agreement, inadequate TPP rules of origin (ROO) at 45 percent but could be as low as 35 percent for auto parts, insufficient currency manipulation restrictions, and manufacturing industry job losses.