The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a proposed mega-regional Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between 16 Asia-Pacific countries including the 10-member ASEAN countries, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Importance of RCEP
The RCEP, when realized will become the largest trade bloc in terms of population with nearly 3.5 billion people. It will also have an estimated 40% of world’s GDP and dominating 30% of global trade. A unique importance of the ambitious RCEP formation is that it contains the three biggest economies of Asia - China, India and Japan. The trade arrangement has big future potential as it holds the two of the fastest growing largest economies – China and India.
