London announced on Friday that after 21 months of negotiations it reached an agreement to join the CPTPP Trans-Pacific trade deal, the biggest trade deal since Brexit.
The UK will become the first European country to join the CPTPP trading bloc, Downing Street said in a statement. Currently, a total of eleven countries have signed the treaty with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
“British companies will now have unprecedented access to markets from Europe to the South Pacific,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement. In the long term, accession will add 1.8 billion pounds (about 2 billion euros) to the country’s economic output, the prime minister said.
His predecessor Boris Johnson applied in January 2021 to join the free trade bloc. After the country left the European Union in 2020, the UK was eagerly looking for new trading partners. Sunak hopes that many more countries will join in the future.
The United States is not among the signatory states. The country, under President Barack Obama, was once the driving force behind the trade deal, then known as the TPP, which was supposed to serve as a counterbalance to China’s economic might. However, his successor Donald Trump was not interested and ended the talks. The current president of the United States, Joe Biden, has also shown no interest in joining the agreement so far.
Watch our news videos in the playlist below:
Free unlimited access to Showbytes? which can!
Sign in or create an account and don’t miss anything from the stars.
“Friendly travel trailblazer. Certified gamer. Evil bacon practitioner. Analyst. Problem solver.”
