Hande Kurtul, Erkut Akkartal

(Yeditepe University, Turkey)

 

 

Abstract: In recent years, European Union (EU) and the United States (US) change their trade policy and also they began negotiations for signing the most comprehensive free trade agreement. Its negotiations began in the second half of 2013 and called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), whose key points are transparency, coherence and non-discriminatory. With these type of qualifications, EU’s and US’s administratives believe that this partnership will boost economic power and not only for EU and US, but also all countries in the world benefit from the outputs of the agreement. On the other hand, although their intensions are widely same direction, sometimes controversial platforms occur, because both parties do not want to change their implementations at some topics such as conformity assessments, genetically modified products and hormone treated meat. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to identify mainly the key challenges of the TTIP with qualitative and quantitative data. Descriptive analysis of the data will be displayed. The agreement has two main body as horizontal side which means regulatory cooperation and sectoral side. In this paper, regulatory cooperation and its context are pointed to be essential subjects for why sectoral side has more details and it is hard to explain all circumstances in sectors. After focusing on the reasons of the existence of the TTIP, the need will be explained. Then the main elements, such as market access, regulatory coherence and improved cooperations, are mentioned. As a conclusion, mostly recommendations and expectations take part because of the fact that negotiations are going on.

 

 

Key words: transatlantic trade and investment partnership; transparency; coherence

 

JEL codes: F13, F15, F42