RCEP

Abstract

The growing dynamics in the Indo-Pacific region, due to its emergence as a hub of global trade and commerce, especially energy supply, has led to increasing strategic contests and competition amongst major powers, transforming the old and germinating new regional imaginations and arrangements. This calls for strengthening of multilateral institutions for maintaining a balance of power in the region, especially between the growing Chinese belligerence and the simultaneous decline of the US alliance system, which has unleashed a whole range of consequences for all major and middle powers. The change in US administration and post-pandemic world order has also given a clarion call for restoring multilateral order in this rather dynamic Indo-Pacific littoral. Due to its increasing geopolitical and geoeconomic significance in recent times, it has witnessed multiple new institution-building initiatives. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) stands out for being the world’s largest free trade area involving the fifteen largest and rapidly growing economies of the Indo-Pacific region. RCEP is geopolitically significant for it establishes the first China-led regional trade arrangement since the pro-US ASEAN FTA set up in 1992. It also presents the first of its kind, pan-Indo-Pacific economic institution. Hence, this chapter explores how RCEP has evolved as a multilateral economic institution and how it has become significant for multilateralism in this region.