London announced on Friday that after 21 months of negotiations it has reached an agreement to join the Trans-Pacific trade agreement CPTPP, the largest 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, the accession will add £1.8 billion (about €2 billion) 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 looking hard for new trading partners. Sunak expects many more countries to 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 agreement, then known as TPP, that was supposed to serve as a counterbalance to China’s economic power. However, his successor Donald Trump was not interested and ended the talks. Current US President Joe Biden has also shown no interest in joining the accord so far
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