New Report Suggests the TPP Is Barely Worth Worrying About | Mother Jones
New Report Suggests the TPP Is Barely Worth Worrying About
Kevin Drum
As required by law, the US International Trade Commission has completed its analysis of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
They used a dynamic computable general equilibrium model for their
analysis, which concluded that the economic impact of the TPP would
be...pretty close to zero. The chart on the right is my feeble attempt
to add some color to this, and you can see that no part of the economy
is affected by so much as 1 percent. Or half a percent. It's more in the
neighborhood of a quarter of a percent three decades from now.
Generally speaking, I'd say this means you should mostly ignore the
economic aspects of TPP. The benefits will be minuscule and the damages
will be minuscule. The error bars on a 30-year forecast are just too big
to say anything more. Instead, you should focus on other aspects of the
agreement. How will it affect poor countries in Asia? Is it a useful
bulwark against the growing influence of China? What do you think of
extending US patent and trademark rules throughout the world? All of
those things are real. The economic impact is basically a crapshoot.
