Expanding the P-4 Trade Agreement into a Broader Trans-Pacific Partnership: Implications, Risks and Opportunities
In 2005, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile and Brunei entered into a path-breaking free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement which is also known as the P-4 Agreement. The agreement contains an open accession provision which explicitly contemplates the expansion of the agreement to include other countries willing to commit to its terms. The expansion of the agreement has important implications for the world trading system. Its broad coverage and open accession provision may suggest that the agreement has the potential to serve as a stepping stone in the path towards further multilateral trade liberalization in the WTO context. On the other hand, expanding the agreement could result in an agreement so powerful that its members no longer consider devoting energies to liberalizing in the WTO context to be of great importance. The article explores some of the unique aspects of the TPP as well as the potential implications of expanding the agreement, both for the East Asian region and for the broader multilateral trading system.
Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement
In this chapter, we explain and evaluate the AUSFTA primarily from an Australian perspective, given that most countries will be in a more or less analogous position to Australia when negotiating an FTA with the US. AUSFTA provides an illustration of the outcomes that countries with relatively little bargaining and economic power can expect from such an FTA. It also serves as a warning of how even an economically successful developed country may end up sacrificing its welfare, public policies and democratic processes in a dogged pursuit to cement relations with the US, in a manner that would be unlikely in the vigorous negotiating environment of the WTO. We begin by examining the way in which the AUSFTA was negotiated, before turning to some of the substantive outcomes of those negotiations in key areas such as goods, services, investment and intellectual property. Finally, we consider the impact of the AUSFTA to date and its future implications.
The politics of becoming bodies: Sex, gender and intersubjectivity in motion
Abstract This paper presents readers with one (research) story about (sexed and gendered) bodies not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena. In telling such a story I examine the role that the screendance, Becoming Bodies , has played in knowledge production and argue for a less ontologically ‘old fashioned’ view of what counts as ‘evidence’. Throughout the paper I draw from a range of feminisms: biological, phenomenological, poststructural, psychoanalytical, and post humanist and performative scholarship of sex and gender. These discourses contest nature/nurture, male/female, body/mind dualisms, and take the political and ethical view that bodies are not neutral; that sex and gender, being a woman or a man are both socially and biologically constructed forms of identity (similar to class and race) that are acquired and learned through socio-cultural regimes of discipline and intersubjective bodily practices. Building on this dynamic and developmental bio-psycho-social view I discuss selected aspects of interview data: (1) the material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies and (2) troubling the intersubjective implications of this for clinical practices.