As with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the more than a dozen free trade agreements (FTAs) concluded by the United States after NAFTA prior to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the TPP’s Trade Remedies Chapter 6 largely leaves the WTO disciplines on global safeguards, dumping and countervailing duties intact.2 Also, as with NAFTA, provision is made for transitional safeguards. These are designed to protect other Parties of the TPP temporarily from injuries caused by scheduled TPP tariff reductions. Where the TPP innovates is through the strengthening of procedural guarantees and transparency when TPP Parties conduct WTO regulated dumping or countervailing duty procedures against other Parties. As other chapters of this book demonstrate, some TPP chapters include major innovations compared to both the WTO agreements and NAFTA. The trade remedies chapter is not one of those.

In most respects, the exceptions and final provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) do not depart significantly from earlier practice by the United States and many of the other Parties; the summaries of Chapters 1 and 27 are therefore very brief. The exceptions are summarized at somewhat greater length in Section 3 below. The most significant are the Chapter 30 final provisions, particularly those discussed in Section 4 below. The first such change relates to the complex provisions that governed entry into force for the original TPP, which effectively required both the United States and Japan to become Parties to the TPP for the agreement to become effective. The second relates to accession by other nations, with the modifications made under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after U.S. withdrawal.

It is easier to understand Chapter 28 of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is unchanged in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), after first considering its origins in Chapter 20 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Accordingly, Section 1 of this chapter discusses the structure and history of NAFTA, Chapter 20. Section 2 discusses the innovations reflected in the TPP. In general the focus is on the significance of the changes, where despite modification of the language it remains possible for a recalcitrant Party to block the formation of panels, as has been the unfortunate case with NAFTA.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement reflects the evolution from United States (and Canadian) investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) practice in Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through multiple free trade agreement investment chapters, to TPP Chapter 9. (There is some irony in the fact that although the United States was a leading participant in the TPP investment chapter it withdrew from the TPP in January 2017.2 When the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USMCA) was negotiated to replace NAFTA, the Parties adopted an abridged version of ISDS, with Canada-United States ISDS appearing and United States-Mexico ISDS affording full protection only for oil and gas and a few other selected industries.3) However, most of the original TPP Chapter 9 on investment including ISDS remains in the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP, which entered into force for six Parties on December 30, 2018.4

International trade is multidisciplinary with a large variety of stakeholders. This book, a chapter-by-chapter assessment of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP; earlier the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP), follows this reality. By assessing and digesting each CPTPP chapter, the book focuses on the practical implications of this modern free trade agreement.