EU-Japan free trade agreement

JEFTA is a redirect to this article. Further meanings are listed under Jephta .

Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA)
Japan-EU Free Trade Agreement (JEFTA)

EU	Japan

The EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement ( EPA from English Economic Partnership Agreement , colloquially JEFTA from English Japan-EU Free Trade Agreement ) is a free trade and investment protection agreement between the European Union and Japan ; it was negotiated from 2013 to the end of 2017. It is the EU's most extensive bilateral trade agreement to date and takes the form of an international treaty . Since the JEFTA free trade agreement covers 30 percent of the world's gross domestic product and 40 percent of global trade, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in Brussels called it “the birth of the world's largest economic zone”.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker confirmed the conclusion of the negotiations on December 8, 2017. It was announced that JEFTA would be signed in mid-2018 and come into force in early 2019. However, there has been reports of no full agreement on investment protection; negotiations in this regard should therefore be continued. After a planned agreement had been postponed several times, on July 6, 2017, the evening before the G20 summit in Hamburg , the EU and Japan reached a "fundamental agreement on the essential elements" of the EPA.

The agreement was signed by both sides at the EU-Japan summit in Tokyo on July 17, 2018. The agreement was ratified by the Japanese Parliament on December 8, 2018 and by the European Parliament on December 12, 2018 . It came into force on February 1, 2019.

Background: Volume of trade relations between the EU and Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, EU Council President Donald Tusk and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a press conference on the free trade agreement in March 2017

Until the EPA came into force, only Switzerland in Europe had had a free trade agreement with Japan (JSFTEPA) since 2009 . With EPA almost ten years later, the EU was able to negotiate a much more extensive agreement with Japan, the EU's second largest trading partner in Asia after China and the sixth largest worldwide:

2016 exports of	[in billion euros]	Share of total extra-EU-28 trade
EU to Japan	58.1	3.3%
Japan to EU	66.5	3.9%
Germany to Japan	18.4	1.5%
Japan to Germany	22.0	2.3%

Japan is also an important investor for the EU:

Total extra-EU direct investment 2011–2014 of	[in billion euros]	proportion of
EU to Japan	12.3	0.88%
Japan to EU	24.8	1.68%

Historical data on trade in goods between Japan and the EU:

Content of the agreement

“[JEFTA] signals to the USA that business can be done without them if necessary, in the direction of China it shows who has the best investment relationships in Asia, and for Europe it opens a way into the Asian market that does not go directly through China leads."

- Martin Schulz, economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo

Lowering tariffs

Exporters from the EU currently pay around EUR 1 billion per year in customs duties for the import of products to Japan. Agricultural products are subject to duties of 21 percent on average. Conversely, the average tariff level for imports from Japan into the EU was 4 percent in 2016, of which around 12.9 percent for agricultural goods and around 2.5 percent for industrial goods.

JEFTA is expected to lower Japanese tariffs on beef, pork and wine and remove 85% of tariffs on agricultural products. Japan is said to recognize over 200 protected geographical names such as Roquefort and Feta . Customs duties on textile products will also be reduced. The tariffs on shoes will initially drop from 30 percent to 21 percent and be abolished completely after ten years. The current 10% tariff on Japanese cars is slated to be reduced within seven years.

Investment protection

In order to protect investments , the EU would like to implement the plan of an international court for the protection of investments developed in the course of the negotiations on CETA at JEFTA instead of the arbitration tribunals usually agreed . Japan has so far refused.

Climate protection

It is the first trade agreement in which the signatories explicitly commit to the Paris Climate Agreement - albeit with the restriction that

"Measures to implement the multilateral environmental agreements [...] are not applied in a way that would amount to arbitrary or unjustified discrimination against the other contracting party or to a disguised restriction on international trade."

- JEFTA Article 16.4.5

Projected benefits from JEFTA and EU commitments

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said at the Japan Business Round Table on CETA :

“With Japan we have now shown that it is possible to carry this model into the world. [...] We can offer our companies, our workers, our consumers an economic and social boost, whether they live in Tokyo, Tallinn or Toulouse. "

The EU Commission hopes that the agreement will:

• According to a study by the London School of Economics, EU exports to Japan could increase by more than a third, and the EU's economic output by 0.76 percent according to an independent study.
• The over 600,000 jobs in the EU linked to exports to Japan and the almost equal number of workers employed by Japanese companies in the EU could increase.
• Sectors that are expected to benefit most from the agreement are pharmaceuticals and medical devices, food, and automobiles and transportation.
• Japanese products should become cheaper for end customers in the EU.
• European standards for products, especially the standards for food and agricultural products, should not be affected.

According to a study by the Ifo Institute and the Bertelsmann Foundation on March 3, 2017, after a start-up phase of ten years, Germany would expect an increase in exports of EUR 8.6 billion annually, an increase in income of EUR 3.4 billion annually and GDP growth of 0.11 percent.

criticism

On 23 June 2017, the Dutch had Greenpeace -Sektion 200 pages Jephta negotiation texts revealed ; According to Greenpeace they show:

• JEFTA would make it more difficult at national and local level to enact new environmental or occupational health and safety regulations, because these are considered a “non-tariff barrier to trade”.
• Japan insists that "private arbitration courts" can be sued if profits have been lost because of "non-tariff trade barriers". The EU has not yet been able to enforce an investment court à la CETA : "This area will be left out for the final negotiations, so it will not be included in the basic agreement".
• In terms of public procurement, Japan wants to continue to prefer domestic companies.
• Illegal timber trade (from Romania's primeval forests to Japan) is "not [...] further restricted by concrete obligations"; there is only a non-binding request to "promote the protection of forests", not even "the EU timber regulation that has been in force since 2013 [...] is mentioned." In CETA and TPP, "the forest paragraphs are formulated stricter."
• Japan's whaling is not specifically prohibited.

Attac sums up his criticism of JEFTA as follows: "With JEFTA, there is a risk of erosion of consumer protection, tougher location competition to the detriment of employees in the EU and Japan and undemocratic parallel justice in favor of international investors."

There is disagreement as to the extent to which the EU-Japan Agreement will facilitate the privatization of the drinking water supply and sewage disposal , which have hitherto been largely publicly operated . The Alliance of Public Water Management (AöW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) see this problem through the use of negative instead of positive lists. The negative lists would not clearly, explicitly and permanently exclude the water areas. The agreement differs from the more detailed and precise agreement with Canada (CETA) in this regard . There was a threat that a) the privatization pressure for drinking water and wastewater would increase, since the German CETA reservation for wastewater was missing, JEFTA contained "a market access obligation for wastewater disposal in Germany" for Japanese companies, and b) that the agreement would later be without parliamentary participation could be extended to water-relevant market areas such as the private appropriation of groundwater and investment protection.

In contrast, the European Commission takes the view that the agreement would not force national governments to privatize or deregulate. There was also a reservation that any decision to privatize could be reversed at any time.

adoption

Based on a ruling by the European Court of Justice ( Art. 218 ), the national parliaments must also be asked about the establishment of arbitration tribunals or portfolio investments. The EU Commission therefore divided the contract into two parts. The Economic Partnership Agreement , in which only tariffs and trade are regulated, only required the approval of the European Parliament , as is usual with previous trade agreements, and was ratified by it on December 12, 2018. Regulations going beyond this are submitted to the national parliaments of all EU states for approval as a strategic partnership agreement.

See also

• Free trade agreement of the European Union

Web links

• Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy: The EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement with questions and answers, accessed on July 10, 2018
• Short question from the party Die Linke to the Bundestag (with answers): Free trade agreement EU-Japan (JEFTA) Short question from the MPs Klaus Ernst, Fabio De Masi, Jörg Cezanne u. a. of the DIE LINKE parliamentary group (BT-Drucksache 19/2366) accessed on July 13, 2018
• European Commission: EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement , accessed July 10, 2018.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ David Böcking, Isabella Reichert: EU Free Trade Agreement with Japan - Then without the USA. In: Spiegel Online . July 17, 2018, accessed on February 1, 2019 : “On Tuesday, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Council President Donald Tusk and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe signed the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), commonly known as Jefta (Japan-EU Free Trade Agreement ) called." 
2. ↑ Sebastion Schöbel: EU-Japan trade agreement - "The largest economic zone in the world". In: tagesschau.de. July 6, 2017, accessed on February 1, 2019 : “The numbers are impressive: Ten percent of the world's population, 30 percent of global gross domestic product, 40 percent of global trade. These are the current key data of the European-Japanese relationship. And that is now to grow with a free trade agreement that Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe today called "the birth of the world's largest economic zone". " 
3. ^ Joint statement by the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. In: europa.eu. European Commission , 8 December 2019, retrieved on 1 February 2019 : “On the basis of the agreement reached today by the negotiators, endorsed by the Commissioner for Trade, Ms. Cecilia Malmström, and the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mr. Taro Kono , we welcome the conclusion of the negotiations on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union and Japan. " 
4. ↑ EU and Japan conclude economic partnership agreements . In: europa.eu. European Commission , December 8, 2017, accessed on February 1, 2019 (English): "The Commission will then submit the agreement to the European Parliament and the EU member states for approval and thus aims to have it before the end of the current term of office of the European Commission to enter into force in 2019. [...] The EU and Japan are also striving to conclude the agreement on a strategic partnership as soon as possible, which will, on the one hand, further strengthen the relationship between the two partners and, on the other hand, define the strategic direction of current and future cooperation and, in this context, for Should ensure coherence. The strategic partnership agreement and the economic partnership agreement are expected to be signed together in 2018. " 
5. ↑ Japan, EU finalize trade deal, aim at implementation in early 2019. In: Nikkei . December 8, 2018, archived from the original on December 27, 2017 ; Retrieved on February 1, 2019 : "In reaching the deal, they are likely to have decided not to include a scheme to settle investment disputes and continue negotiations over the agenda, the sources said." 
6. ↑ EU and Japan reach agreement in principle on economic partnership agreements. In: europa.eu. European Commission , July 6, 2017, accessed on February 1, 2019 : "Today we reached a fundamental agreement on an Economic Partnership Agreement, the effect of which extends far beyond our borders." 
7. ↑ Fanal against Trump: EU and Japan seal their biggest trade agreement to date. In: Spiegel Online . July 17, 2018, accessed February 1, 2019 . 
8. ↑ Detlef Drewes: That's behind the Jephta free trade agreement. In: Augsburger Allgemeine . July 18, 2018, accessed February 1, 2019 . 
9. ↑ Notice on the date of entry into force of the Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and Japan , accessed on February 1, 2019.
10. ↑ The free trade agreement with Japan comes into force on September 1, 2009. In: State Secretariat for Economic Affairs . July 29, 2009, accessed January 2, 2019 . 
11. ↑ German exports increased by 1.1% in 2016. Federal Statistical Office , accessed on July 12, 2017 . 
12. ↑ Countries and regions: Japan. (No longer available online.) European Commission , archived from the original on June 23, 2017 ; accessed on July 12, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
13. ↑ Eurostat, accessed on 31 July 2018
14. ^ Till Hoppe, Martin Kölling: Agreement between the EU and Japan: "Hoisting the flag of free trade". In: Handelsblatt . July 6, 2017, accessed July 22, 2018 . 
15. ↑ ^{a b} Jeepa’s creepers: A new trade deal between the EU and Japan. In: The Economist . July 8, 2017, accessed July 22, 2018 . 
16. ↑ Answer of the Federal Government to the minor question from the MPs Alexander Ulrich, Dr. Diether Dehm, Klaus Ernst, other MPs and the DIE LINKE parliamentary group, p. 5 ( BT-Drs. 18/12518 ).
17. ↑ EU-Japan trade agreement: agreed on time for the JEFTA summit. In: tagesschau.de . July 6, 2017, accessed July 22, 2018 . 
18. ↑ Lisa Hegemann, Sybille Klormann: Jefta: EU and Japan sign free trade agreements. In: Zeit Online . July 17, 2018, accessed July 22, 2018 . 
19. ↑ JEFTA Article 16.4.5
20. ↑ Cecilia Malmström: The Benefits of an EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement. July 11, 2017. Retrieved July 12, 2017 . 
21. ↑ How much difference will an agreement make to trade between the EU and Japan? European Commission , May 18, 2017, accessed July 7, 2017 . 
22. ↑ Gabriel Felbermayr, Fukunari Kimura, Toshihiro Okubo, Marina Steininger, Erdal Yalcin: GED Study: On the Economics of an EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement . Bertelsmann Stiftung , Gütersloh March 2017 ( Online [PDF; 8,9 MB ]).
23. ↑ Leak: Trade agreement between the EU and Japan with weak environmental protection standards. June 23, 2017. Retrieved July 7, 2017 . 
24. ↑ Investors are preferred in the EU trade pact with Japan, Federal Government Management Report. (No longer available online.) June 23, 2017, formerly in the original ; Retrieved July 7, 2017 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
25. ^ Joshua P. Meltzer, Brookings Institution, in: Europe and Japan Near Trade Deal as US Takes Protectionist Path. June 23, 2017. Retrieved July 7, 2017 . 
26. ↑ Attac criticizes declaration on EU-Japan agreement. July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 7, 2017 . 
27. ↑ Christa Hecht: AöW statement on the economic partnership agreement between the European Union and Japan. (PDF) Alliance of Public Water Management eV (AöW), May 14, 2018, accessed on July 18, 2018 . 
28. ^ Stadtwerke Karlsruhe: Evaluation: Water management in the EU-Japan economic agreement. (PDF) March 29, 2018, accessed on August 19, 2018 . 
29. ↑ EU-JAPAN agreement. Retrieved July 20, 2018 . 
30. ^ BDEW: BDEW on the planned free trade agreement between Japan and the EU. Retrieved July 20, 2018 . 
31. ↑ Katrin Abele: Clarification: EU-Japan Agreement does not lead to water privatization - Germany - European Commission. July 6, 2018, accessed July 18, 2018 . 
32. ↑ What the ECJ opinion means for Ceta, TTIP and Co. , accessed on May 18, 2018