The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – A long hard road to multilateralism?

The first round of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the European Union and the United States took place during the week of 8 July in Washington after nearly two years of preparations. If concluded successfully, the TTIP would become the world’s largest free trade pact. The EU and the US account for nearly half of the world’s GDP and 30% of world trade with exchanges of goods and services worth around €723 billion a year and €1.8 billion a day. The Partnership, unprecedented in its scope and ambition, has generated great expectations which will be hard to meet in reality. It could however have a beneficial effect on trade multilateralism, provided that it is the result of an open negotiating process.