Britain is in a good position for a fast agreement because it imports more goods from the US than it exports

White House officials believe a trade deal with Britain can be finalised within three weeks, The Telegraph can reveal.

An insider familiar with the strategy said London was in a good position for a rapid deal although the UK will likely be in a second wave of announcements, following Japan, India, and South Korea, which Donald Trump wants to reach agreements with in order to isolate China.

https://archive.ph/Ygt7i

  • talEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    ‘within three weeks’

    If so, it seems pretty unlikely to me that the people negotiating can be doing much in terms of modifying things from the pre-tariff situation, and Trump is likely to do what he did with NAFTA->USMCA — change very little, and then spend time giving the impression to supporters that he’s drastically modified the trade environment (Fox News: “Trump has solved our trade problems that Biden permitted to happen with the best trade deal ever”). I mean, trying to complete any kind of meaningful free trade agreement tends to take far longer than that.

    https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/how-long-does-it-take-conclude-trade-agreement-us

    Table 1 Duration of US free trade agreement negotiations (in months)

    US FTA partner From launch date to signing From launch date to implementation
    Jordan 4 18
    Dominican Republic 6 37
    Bahrain 7 30
    Oman 10 45
    Korea 13 69
    Australia 14 22
    Israel 15 29
    Morocco 16 35
    Costa Rica 18 71
    El Salvador 18 37
    Guatemala 18 40
    Honduras 18 38
    Mexico 18 31
    Nicaragua 18 38
    Canada 20 32
    Peru 23 56
    Singapore 29 37
    Chile 30 36
    Colombia 31 96
    Panama 38 102
    Average 18 45

    On top of the fact that this would be off-the-charts short for a meaningful FTA in any case, neither of the two “shortening” conditions that were found exist here; it is not a US election year, and while the UK is nominally a monarchy, the monarch holds no power and Parliament is, no doubt, going to be involved in any substantial change in trading relationship.

    Despite the small sample, two variables are significant in explaining the delay between launch and signing.

    1. A king. Having a monarch reduces the length of negotiation by about half. Only four agreements took less than a year, and three were with Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. A king surely has more leeway to carry out reforms he deems reasonable. (The fourth was the Dominican Republic’s negotiation to join the Central American Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA, though it benefited from joining late, which may suggest that late entrants to an already negotiated TPP could also face shorter delays.)
    2. An election year. Agreements that are signed in a US presidential election year end up taking about 40 percent less time than agreements signed in other years. This makes sense: Negotiating presidents want to close agreements that they started, which will be part of their legacy. The urge to close is real: More than half of the US agreements were signed in election years and of course the TPP, if implemented, will add to that group.

    In the UK’s case, there was some prior discussion about a UK-USA FTA, so maybe they could bootstrap off that to reduce the negotiation time, but I have a hard time believing that even an administration-friendly, Republican-majority Congress is going to sign off on whatever the Trump administration negotiates in a major FTA without having some kind of input.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom–United_States_Free_Trade_Agreement

    • Docus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 days ago

      Upvote for your efforts to share facts, but I really don’t need that many words to convince me that Trump is talking shit, again.