Tsai hopeful Taiwan-U.S. initiative will lead to trade deal
ROC Central News Agency
06/02/2022 12:57 PM
Taipei, June 2 (CNA) President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said Wednesday she was hopeful that a new bilateral trade initiative between Taiwan and the United States will eventually lead to a trade agreement for the two countries.
The new initiative - the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade - was announced at a press conference in Taipei on Wednesday evening by Taiwan trade representative John Deng (鄧振中).
In a Facebook post that same evening, Tsai said that Deng had discussed the establishment of the initiative with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai during a meeting of APEC trade ministers in Thailand last month.
Tsai said she hoped the program would lead to the strengthening of Taiwan-U.S. trade ties, as well as to negotiations on a "high-standard and economically meaningful trade agreement."
According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the initiative's goal was "to develop an ambitious roadmap for negotiations for reaching agreements with high-standard commitments and economically meaningful outcomes" in 11 key trade areas.
In Taiwan's business community, reaction to the new initiative was largely positive, despite its coming just over a week after Taiwan was excluded from the launch of the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).
Lin Por-fong (林伯豐), chairman of Taiwan's Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce, said the initiative was "a good thing," but noted that neither it nor the IPEF contained provisions on the high-priority issue of tariff relief.
While the negotiations would not cover tariffs in the near term, the initiative would "open the door" to deeper relations and would boost Taiwan's international visibility, said Lee Yu-chia (李育家), head of the National Association of Small and Medium Enterprises.
Roy Lee (李淳), deputy executive director of the Taiwan WTO & RTA Center at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, said the initiative is highly similar in content to the United States' recent economic negotiations with Japan and the European Union.
This shows that Washington now views Taiwan as a similarly important economic and trade partner - something that would previously have been unthinkable, Lee said.
The initiative is also significantly broader in scope than the U.S. and Taiwan's Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), which is primarily used to resolve trade disputes on specific issues, he added.
The 11 areas covered under the initiative include trade facilitation, regulatory practices, standards, state-owned enterprises, non-market policies and practices, and anti-corruption.
The first in-person meeting under the new initiative will be held in Washington at the end of June.
(By Yeh Su-ping, Tseng Chih-yi and Matthew Mazzetta)
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