hankyoreh

Lee Kwang-jae, who chairs the National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, pounds his gavel at a plenary session of the committee on Wednesday afternoon at the National Assembly. (Yonhap News)

The National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee voted Wednesday to ratify the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which has been called the world’s biggest free trade agreement.

Once the ratification passes the assembly’s plenary session, the agreement is expected to go into effect around early February 2022.

In a plenary session Wednesday afternoon, the foreign affairs committee voted to approve the RCEP ratification in its original form.

The participants in the agreement now include the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. While South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Philippines have yet to complete their parliamentary ratification procedures, six other ASEAN countries and four non-ASEAN countries have done so, satisfying the conditions for the agreement to take effect.

The agreement is set to officially go into effect on Jan. 1 of next year.

The 15 countries party to the agreement accounted for a combined gross domestic product of US$25.6 trillion as of 2019 — or 30% of global GDP — and a combined population of 2.26 billion people, or 30% of the world’s population.

While lawmakers approved the ratification plan as a “nonpartisan measure” at Wednesday’s meeting, they were also sternly critical of the fact that the South Korean government only presented the ratification bill to the National Assembly a full year after it signed the agreement in November 2020.

“Even if [the ratification bill] gets passed in the plenary session [on Thursday], it takes 60 days for it to go into effect, which means it could only do so by around early February,” said People’s Party lawmaker Lee Tae-kyu.

“In other countries, the RCEP starts on Jan. 1 of next year. That means at least a month during which we won’t be able to enjoy tariff benefits,” he noted.

In response, Jeon Yoon-jong, director of the trade negotiation office of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, stressed that South Korea had “carried out the most stringent domestic procedures among the 15 countries.”

“We commissioned research for around five months, and we had experts evaluating what impact an enormous agreement like the RCEP would have on our industry and economy,” he added.

By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr