This will make the UK the first European country to join the CPTPP trade bloc, Downing Street said in a statement. At the moment, with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam, a total of eleven countries have now signed the treaty.
“British companies now have unprecedented access to markets from Europe to the South Pacific,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement. In the long term, the accession will add 1.8 billion pounds (about 2 billion euros) to the country’s economic output, the prime minister said.
His predecessor Boris Johnson applied to join the free trade bloc in January 2021. After the country left the European Union in 2020, the UK was hard at work looking for new trading partners. Sunak expects many more countries to join in the future.
The United States is not a signatory to the agreement. The country, under President Barack Obama, was once the driving force behind the trade agreement, then known as TPP, which was to serve as a counterbalance to China’s economic power. However, his successor Donald Trump was not interested in it and ended the talks. The current US president Joe Biden has also so far shown no interest in joining the agreement.
