The economic impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: What have we learned from CGE simulation?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, if were it to be successfully implemented, would be one of the largest regional agreements ever seen. It is the only exemplar to date of a mega-regional FTA for which negotiations have been successfully concluded, and a landmark in evolving approaches to Asia-Pacific integration. As such, quantitative assessments of its potential effects are of considerable interest. One of the most widely used techniques for evaluating the economic impact of regional trading agreements is numerical simulation with computable general equilibrium, or CGE, models. There have now been a large number of papers written that use CGE methods to analyse the potential economic impact of the TPP agreement under varying theoretical and policy assumptions. In this paper we provide a synthesis of the key results that have emerged from the literature, and introduce some new simulation results of our own to anchor the discussion.