took place on Friday afternoon<\/a>, as the World Trade Organization scrambles to advance long-stalled reforms \u2014 including efforts to keep digital trade permanently tariff-free.<\/p>\nEU Trade Commissioner Maro\u0161 \u0160ef\u010dovi\u010d highlighted the bloc’s existing digital trade agreements \u2014 or DTAs \u2014 with CPTPP member countries Singapore and South Korea, and said that it had launched negotiations this month on a similar accord with Canada.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could serve as a blueprint \u2014 an inspiration \u2014 for a region-to-region track of work in this area and as the next major task for our teams to begin preparing. An EU-CPTPP DTA would be an enormous success. We need to accelerate, as DTAs represent a future-proof layer of trade agreements,\u201d\u00a0an EU official cited \u0160ef\u010dovi\u010d as saying.<\/p>\n
The nearly 40 nations in the EU and Indo-Pacific CPTPP trade blocs are on a quest to defend the world trade system, which has been buffeted by U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s tariff war.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve got a common understanding around these three plurilaterals, but we also have common understanding that we need to see reforms,\u201d Sidhu said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do we make sure that the WTO works in the current context?\u201d he added. \u201cBecause it cannot be status quo. We cannot just ask for another two years on e-commerce and continue to move forward,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
This report has been updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a \u201cstrong push at the dialogue by the EU for a digital trade agreement between CPTPP…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[521,2530,26259,2814,3677,6314,2000,299,5187,1699,3055,1197,2129,1199,6648,479,1201,6862],"class_list":["post-857672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-asia","tag-cameroon","tag-cptpp","tag-data","tag-digital","tag-e-commerce","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-global-economy","tag-investment","tag-mark-carney","tag-services","tag-supply-chains","tag-tariffs","tag-trade","tag-trade-agreements"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116311083542689834","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}