The Trans-Pacific Partnership as Megaregulation

in Benedict Kingsbury, et al., Megaregulation Contested: Global Economic Ordering After TPP (OUP, 2019)

IILJ Working Paper 2019/2 (MegaReg Series)

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 19-46

38 Pages Posted: 1 Oct 2019 Last revised: 3 Jan 2020

See all articles by Benedict Kingsbury

Benedict Kingsbury

New York University School of Law

Paul Mertenskötter

NYU Law School - Institute for International Law and Justice

Richard B. Stewart

New York University School of Law

Thomas Streinz

NYU School of Law - Guarini Global Law & Tech

Date Written: May 10, 2019

Abstract

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) brings into legal effect a new form of inter-governmental economic ordering and regulatory governance on an extended “megaregional” scale. This chapter proposes the concept of “megaregulation” as a way to understand what is distinctive about TPP and about the particular type of governance project which it partly pioneered. Megaregulation as exemplified by TPP is characterized by five features. First, it comprehensively covers commercial flows in goods, services, capital, and data. Second, its broad aim is to create a generalized freedom to operate for large corporations and their affiliates across the set of national markets covered by the treaty. Third, as its method, megaregulation employs regulatory alignment — nudging and shaping both the substance and the processes of national regulatory systems. Fourth, megaregulation involves a large but not universal (like the WTO) scale in volume of covered economic activity and creates significant gravitational pulls and emulatory pressures for third parties. Fifth, megaregulation takes the treaty-institutional form which prescribes detailed rules and empowers some inter-governmental or transnational institutions and the communities of practice spawning around them. TPP’s specific version of megaregulation further advances an ordo- or neo-liberal vision of the state and its relation to markets that deliberately builds out contrasts with China’s party-state economic ordering, thereby giving it lasting geopolitical and geoeconomic relevance.

Keywords: international economic law, global economic governance, transnational regulation, mega-regional agreements, Asia-Pacific

Suggested Citation

Kingsbury, Benedict and Mertenskötter, Paul and Stewart, Richard B. and Streinz, Thomas, The Trans-Pacific Partnership as Megaregulation (May 10, 2019). in Benedict Kingsbury, et al., Megaregulation Contested: Global Economic Ordering After TPP (OUP, 2019), IILJ Working Paper 2019/2 (MegaReg Series), NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 19-46, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3456731 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3456731

Benedict Kingsbury

New York University School of Law ( email )

40 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012-1099
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212-998-6278 (Phone)

Paul Mertenskötter (Contact Author)

NYU Law School - Institute for International Law and Justice ( email )

139 MacDougal Street, 3rd floor
New York, NY 10012
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.iilj.org

Richard B. Stewart

New York University School of Law ( email )

40 Washington Square South
Room 411F
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United States
212-992-8165 (Phone)
212-995-4590 (Fax)

Thomas Streinz

NYU School of Law - Guarini Global Law & Tech ( email )

40 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012-1099
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.guariniglobal.org

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