China trying for regional trade pact by 2015: Premier

Trade winds put protectionism on agenda

Harold McGraw III, chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the board of McGraw Hill Financial, told reporters on Tuesday in Beijing that the United States-led Trans-Pacific Partnership can go ahead without China.

"What we are trying to accomplish now is an agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership of 12 countries. By the way, there is a fair bit of enthusiasm that the deal could happen relatively soon. Then you have got three countries outside the 12: South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia. The plan will be to convince them that there are disadvantages if you don't join. If they take part, then there will be 15.

"The big hope will be that China will want to be a part of this. We have to do everything possibly to convince and work with China to make it a part of it. If China is not a part of the TPP, the TPP can go ahead. But if China is a part of it, it will be even that much more successful," said the chairman.

"We want to see the WTO, the rules-based organization, working with the regional trade agreements to make sure that we get some common rules. If people are fragmented, going in the wrong direction, and creating different languages, different kinds of rules, you will get unevenness in terms of growth, jobs, prosperity. So we want to see the WTO rules to be the common platform for all the regional agreements," he added.

The trade facilitation agreement alone will add $1 trillion of new growth to the world economy, create 21 million new jobs and 18 million of them will come from the developing world, said McGraw.

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