Indian and South African ministers have agreed on the need for the early completion of their Custom Union and Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) negotiations.India's Minister for Commerce, Industry & Textiles, Shri Anand Sharma, and Rob Davies, the South African Minister of Trade and Industry, met in Johannesburg to review the ongoing talks. Both sides have instructed their officials to meet and thrash out their differences.

Under regional FTAs like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), far fewer countries are involved compared to multilateral trade negotiations like the Doha Round.The potential trade-offs in negotiations are more manageable and participant states may be more likely to make offers and examine concessions. But apart from this possible advantage, the TPP process has many downsides, and is undermining successful multilateral free trade.

Japan's main governing party is expected to take time before deciding whether to participate in negotiations on a free-trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba says the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, will be one of the issues in the next upper house election scheduled for July.

JAKARTA, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian Trade Minister Gita Wirtjawan on Monday said that Indonesia will not aggressively slash its crude palm oil (CPO) export tax as an effort to boost competition with Malaysia which plans to cut its export tax for CPO to zero this month.

New Delhi/PTI: The long pending negotiations for the India-European Union free trade agreement may finally move ahead with the EU’s chief negotiator scheduled to visit New Delhi this week, amid positive signals emanating from the 27-nation bloc."We have got positive indications and signals from the EU. Chief negotiators of both the sides are scheduled to meet this week here," a senior official told PTI.

For eight years, Pascal Lamy has kept a staid, European hand on the World Trade Organization, guiding it beyond the convulsive era of anti-globalization protests even if he was unable to make much headway on the stalled Doha round of global trade talks.

This will be a big year for Japan in trade talks. Expanding trade is important for the Japanese economy because Japan lacks natural resources. In conducting trade talks, Japan must (1) try to find agreements beneficial to all negotiating partners while (2) protecting national interests, especially by preventing trade agreements from tearing up communities and from undermining the social policy fabric that Japan has painstakingly established over many decades.

(Reuters) - The United States has filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization challenging Indonesia's rules for imports of horticultural products, animal products and animals, the WTO said on Thursday.The complaint says Indonesia's non-automatic import licenses and quotas "have significant trade-restrictive effects on imports and are used to implement what appear to be WTO-inconsistent measures", a WTO statement said.

An analysis issued late last month projects that a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement among current TPP participants would yield $24 billion in income gains for the United States by 2025, and would overall yield $74 billion in gains for the 11 current TPP members. The study also predicts that TPP would cause $21 billion in income losses for China because TPP would give other Asian exporters an advantage over China in accessing the U.S. market.

ISLAMABAD, Jan. 10 (Xinhua) -- Thailand intends to sign a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Pakistan to further promote bilateral trade and economic relations, Foreign Minister of Thailand Surapong Tovichakchaikul said in Islamabad on Thursday, local media reported. In a meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Asharf, he said Thailand is committed to further enhance the trade and bilateral relations with Pakistan, the volume of which is presently around 1 billion U.S. dollars.