Ngo Duc Manh, LL.D
Vice Chairman
National Assembly Committee for External Affairs
Vietnam is currently conducting negotiations on a number of free trade agreements (FTAs) with many top trading partners, including the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The negotiations on these two agreements are being expedited for conclusion in the coming time. Both the EVFTA and TPP are important trade deals as the EU and the US are the country’s most important trading partners. With the ambition of negotiating a comprehensive agreement that includes not only market opening commitments but also other related investment, environment, competitiveness and sustainable development issues, these agreements are the new-generation free trade deals that, once concluded, will have great impacts on each sector and the whole economy of the country, bringing both opportunities and challenges to many fields in which the legal field will be mostly affected by the agreements.
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| President Truong Tan Sang at Trans-Pacific Partnership’s high-level meeting within the 22nd APEC Forum in Beijing__Photo: Nguyen Khang/VNA |
Within the framework of negotiations on the FTAs that Vietnam is pursuing, apart from negotiations in traditional specialized fields on goods, trade, service or government procurement, the TPP and EVFTA are new-generation FTAs with greater governing scale. Besides cutting import tariffs on almost all products, other terms target the liberalization of trade in services and investment in both services and industry. The agreements also pose strict principles for related fields such as protection of intellectual property rights, public procurement, competition, law transparency and sustainable development (e.g., environmental and social rights)...
