Originally, 16 RCEP member countries, including India, launched the first round of RCEP negotiations in November 2012 and announced the substantial conclusion of negotiations in November 2019, after 31 rounds of negotiations. One of the main areas of the dispute was India`s reluctance to accept the same level of market access commitments, fearing that vulnerable sectors in India would suffer and be unable to compete with more advanced and efficient producers in other RCEP member countries, such as China, Australia and New Zealand. India also expressed concern about the threat of circumvention of rules of origin due to tariff differences between RCEP parties, saying this could lead to a large influx of agricultural and industrial imports and worsen India`s large and growing trade deficit with China. Over the next decade, RCEP and CPTPP will boost intra-Asian trade, influence the direction of global value chains, and determine the future evolution of the economic architecture of the Asia-Pacific region. In the case of RCEP, the economic benefits are certainly more modest and can take years to materialize, but the symbolic message inherent in RCEP is the largest trade agreement in the world. Other ancillary agreements have been adopted to allay fears about the potential impact of the Treaty on the labour market and the environment. Critics feared that, in general, low wages in Mexico would attract U.S. and Canadian companies, leading to a relocation of production to Mexico and a rapid decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, environmentalists were worried about the potentially disastrous effects of rapid industrialization in Mexico, which has no experience in implementing and enforcing environmental legislation. Potential environmental issues were addressed in the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), which established the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) in 1994. Although NAFTA did not keep everything its supporters had promised, it remained in force.
Indeed, in 2004, NAFTA extended NAFTA to five Central American countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua). In the same year, the Dominican Republic joined the group by signing a free trade agreement with the United States, followed by Colombia in 2006, Peru in 2007 and Panama in 2011. . . .