World Bank Report: TPP Will Bring Negligible Economic Benefit To US, Canada And Australia

from the well,-that's-awkward dept

Supporters of TPP generally insist it's absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. That's because there isn't any: despite the impact that TPP's measures will have on how the US and other countries do business, there are astonishingly few studies on whether it will indeed have a positive impact overall. Just over a year ago, we wrote about one of the rare attempts to model TPP, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, which came up with the following result for countries like the US and Australia:

TPP is projected to have no measurable impacts on real GDP

However, that particular study only looked at the effect of removing traditional tariffs; as it pointed out, TPP includes other elements that might also boost GDP. Fortunately, we now have a new report from the World Bank, no less, which took into account all aspects of the proposed deal. Here's the summary of what it found (pdf):

The model simulations suggest that, by 2030, the TPP will raise member country GDP by 0.4-10 percent, and by 1.1 percent, on a GDP-weighted average basis.

That's a little vague: 10% GDP increase is very different from only 0.4%, so it really matters who gets what. The detailed figures are as follows:

Vietnam -- 10%
Malaysia -- 8%
Brunei -- 5%
New Zealand -- 3.1%
Singapore -- 3%
Japan -- 2.7%
Peru -- 2.1%
Mexico -- 1.4%
Canada -- 1.2%
Chile -- 1%
Australia -- 0.7%
US -- 0.4%

But those figures too are misleading, because they refer to the cumulative GDP gain from TPP by 2030. It's not clear when the World Bank econometric model assumes TPP will come into effect, but by 2030 it's clearly been running for at least ten years, and maybe even 12. That means all of the figures above need to be divided by at least a factor of 10 in order to arrive at the annual boost to growth, which provides a better measure of TPP's impact than the overall figure.

So according to the World Bank's figures, the US will gain an extra 0.04% GDP per year on average, as a result of TPP; Australia an extra 0.07% annually, and Canada a boost of 0.12% per year. In other words, they differ from the USDA's earlier projection of "no measurable impacts on real GDP" by amounts that are so small they will be swamped by the general imprecision of the model -- trying to predict what will happen to a big chunk of the global economy out in 2030 is hard, and that's putting it mildly.

The fact that two econometric models of TPP's effects, both from highly-respected institutions, predict that TPP will produce vanishingly-small economic benefits for key countries, including the US, could explain why there are so few such studies. A cynic might suggest that others were started but generated such inconveniently-awful outcomes that they were quietly dropped and never published.

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Filed Under: australia, canada, economics, tpp, us, world bank