With the US out of agreement, the gains are smaller and smaller with most of the losses still there in terms of the environmental chapters, labour chapters, intellectual property chapters, ISDS and government procurement of pharmaceutical chapters.
All in all, it is getting too hard to work out whether this shrinking gain has more costs because most of the costs cannot be quantified.
When the original TPP agreement was signed, various New Zealand economists weighed in. There wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for the deal. Here was Eric Crampton’s summary of a few contributions.
I think it’s fair to say that Brian Easton sits to the left of the NZ economist punditsphere, and that Mike Reddell sits to the right of the same.
In the past couple days, they’ve both put out their views on the TPPA. Reddell winds up arguing generally against it, though without saying it shouldn’t be signed, and Easton in favour, though not that enthusiastically. Both make nuanced arguments. Easton talks about the flow-on consequences of rejecting the deal at this point. Reddell talks about how the layers of bureaucracy to which we may well be signing up will do nothing to improve New Zealand’s declining productivity, though he falls short of saying NZ should reject…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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