Australian Trade Policy on Free Trade Agreements
During the last two decades, there has been a world-wide proliferation of Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs) which has resulted in numerous trade agreements.
It is estimated that more than half of the world trade now takes place within RTAs.
Australia's commitments to a liberalised trade policy have been closely aligned with the non-discriminatory global trading system promoted by the WTO. Similar to its Asia-Pacific neighbours, Australia also undertook its own unilateral reforms after the 1980s and supported the creation of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and its initiatives. However, slow progress in the multilateral system especially after the WTO meetings in Seattle and Doha, the lack of consensus amongst APEC members, and the rapid progress of RTAs in Asia prompted Australia to move in the direction of bilateralism as it did in the recent past.
Australia's involvement in bilateral trade agreements goes back to 1983 when the Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Agreement (CERA) was negotiated.
The CERA has become one of the most successful FTAs and it has contributed to a phenomenal growth in trade between the two countries since its inception. The agreement is also regarded as perhaps the only preferential trade treaty which included trade in all goods and services except a very narrow negative list (Armstrong 2012).
Consequently, Australia has become New Zealand's number one trading partner while New Zealand is now Australia's sixth most important trading partner.
After a period of strong support for multilateralism, Australia's trade policy took a significant turn towards bilateral FTAs. This resulted in a series of preferential trade agreements between Australia and some of its most important trading partners. Australia successfully negotiated an FTA with Singapore in 2003 (Sen 2004). It came into effect in the second half of that year. Australia also signed an FTA with Thailand which became operational in January 2005 (CIE 2004, Siriwardana 2006).
Australia's commitments to bilateralism became rather prominent with the negotiation of the Australia-United States FTA which came into effect in 2005. At the time of signing the agreement, the US was Australia's second largest trading partner.
Under the FTA, 86% of bilateral trade was supposed to be traded tax-frec and it was envisaged that every bilaterally-traded commodity would achieve tax-free status except sugar and dairy products by 2022 (Siriwardana 2007). While Australia gained access to the wider US agricultural market under the FTA, the most significant breakthrough was the market for Australian lamb, reducing the market share enjoyed by New Zealand (Armstrong 2012). The most recent FTAs that Australia has implemented are with Chile
(2009), with ASEAN and New Zealand (2010), with Malaysia (2012) with South Korea
(2014), and with Japan (2015). The nine agreements thus far under operation account for 42% of Australia's total trade (DFAT 2014).Australia's most recently implemented two FTAs with Japan and South Korea will account for 11 and 5% of Australia's total trade, respectively. Once these two agreements come into effect, Australia will have 42% of its total trade covered by regional trading arrangements. After prolonged negotiations Australia also signed its tenth FTA with China in June 2015 and though its implementation date yet to be determined. In addition Australia is currently pursuing six more FTAs-two bilateral FTA negotiations with India and Indonesia; and four plurilateral FTA negotiations under the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Pacific Trade FTA.
relationship between these two countries that provides a promising foundation for an shows a sudden increase since 2006. This is a clear evidence of a growing bilateral trade a steady trade surplus with South Korea throughout the period, 1980-2013, which consideration while imports display a gradual upward trend. Australia has maintained since 2000 according to Figure 2. Exports grew rapidly over the period under The importance of South Korea as a trading partner to Australia has also accelerated Figure 3 displays the trend in Australian exports of emissions-intensive goods to Japan and South Korea. How much new emissions would be created by the two new FTAs largely depend on the composition of current exports. Figure 3 indicates that South Korea imports more emissions-intensive goods from Australia than Japan. It appears that nearly 80% of the exports that go to South Korea are emissions intensive whereas to Japan it is about 65% until 2011 and the share is falling. Перевди