In the early years of the twenty-first century proposals reflecting two distinct “visions” of Asia-Pacific integration were being advanced for consolidating the regional trade architecture through the establishment of region-wide trade agreements. The rise of East Asian regionalism was reflected in proposals for an East Asian Free Trade Area (EAFTA) and Comprehensive Economic Partnership for East Asia (CEPEA), envisaged as major elements in an agenda for building an economically integrated East Asian region. APEC’s “trans-Pacific vision”, of integrating economies on both sides of the Pacific through achievement of APEC’s Bogor goals of free trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region, was refreshed in modified form with the proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), conceived in principle as a free trade agreement embracing all APEC members.

In 2006 APEC leaders sought to emphasise complementarity between the two “visions” by formally adopting a Regional Economic Integration agenda in which the FTAAP was recognized as a “long-term prospect”. At Yokohama in 2010 the leaders set out the way forward in more concrete terms, when they unambiguously endorsed the FTAAP as the end-point to be reached in the evolution of the Asia-Pacific regional trade architecture, while at the same time endorsing a “two-track” approach to its eventual achievement. The leaders stated that achievement of the FTAAP is to be based on progress made within both a “trans-Pacific track”, represented by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving economies from both sides of the Pacific, and an “East Asian track”, now represented by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a successor initiative to the EAFTA and CEPEA, with participation at this stage limited to the sixteen “ASEAN Plus Six” economies on the western side of the Pacific. Six of the 21 APEC economies are currently participating in both “tracks”, while four are participating in neither track. Four of the RCEP participants are not members of APEC.

The leaders left open the question of how the two “tracks” might evolve and eventually converge into the FTAAP. In the meantime, attention is focused on the substance of the TPP and RCEP agreements being negotiated within each “track”, and their implications both for the size and distribution of the prospective economic benefits of each agreement, and for the prospects of each agreement for gaining acceptance from other economies in the Asia-Pacific region as the “model” for the eventual FTAAP.

Of the two agreements, the TPP at this stage appears to have the more ambitious and comprehensive agenda. After three years negotiations have advanced to the point where failure, while still possible, would be a major surprise, but there are many sensitive issues remaining to be resolved. In addition to the expected market access issues of particular sensitivity to individual participating economies, other highly sensitive issues involve rules of origin, intellectual property, pharmaceutical evaluation pricing and subsidy programmes, management of electronic data flows, labour and environment. These and other issues are discussed in detail in the paper. How these issues are eventually resolved will be important in determining both the extent to which the TPP lives up to its stated ambition of being a “high quality” agreement and also its prospects of being accepted as a “model” for an eventual FTAAP.

The RCEP negotiations are only just beginning. It is correspondingly more difficult to evaluate its likely content and its potential as a basis for the eventual FTAAP. It appears likely that the most substantive provisions will be those on trade in goods, trade in services, and investment, prospects for which are analysed in detail in the paper. In these areas the RCEP faces formidable challenges in consolidating existing arrangements among the participating economies to a level that would mark an impressive step towards the eventual FTAAP. On the other hand the RCEP may be better placed than the TPP to develop rules of origin that foster deep integration among the production systems of participating economies. Provisions on intellectual property and competition policy are included in the proposed content of the RCEP, but it would be a surprise if these provisions approach the depth of commitment being sought in the TPP.

Like the TPP before it, RCEP faces all the issues involved in establishing agenda priorities and modalities for negotiating an agreement among countries that in many cases are already linked by existing agreements, or in some cases by ongoing negotiations. The complexities and difficulties will be compounded by the likelihood that the participating economies will come to the negotiations with widely divergent levels of ambition. Especially under these conditions ASEAN’s determination that the RCEP should be an ASEAN-led process also means that RCEP negotiations could turn out to a defining test of ASEAN’s ability to maintain its leadership role in regional economic integration.