On 21 October 2019, the IILJ launched Megaregulation Contested: Global Economic Ordering After TPP (OUP, 2019) at an event in Tokyo co-hosted by the The National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Opening remarks were given by GRIPS Vice-President Kiyotaka Yokomichi. Rector David Malone (UNU), Prof. Kenichi Kawasaki (GRIPS), Prof. Christine Davis (Harvard) and Prof. Benedict Kingsbury (NYU) engaged in a panel discussion about the issues raised by the book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Japan-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) of 2018 is the most far-reaching ‘megaregional’ economic agreement in force, with several major countries beyond its eleven negotiating countries also interested. Still bearing the stamp of the original US involvement before the Trump-era reversal, TPP is the first instance of ‘megaregulation’: a demanding combination of inter-state economic ordering and national regulatory governance on a highly ambitious substantive and trans-regional scale.

Megaregulation Contested: Global Economic Ordering After TPP provides an extensive analysis of TPP as a megaregulatory project for channelling and managing new pressures of globalization, and of core critical arguments made against economic megaregulation from standpoints of development, inequality, labour rights, environmental interests, corporate capture, and elite governance.

At a time when the WTO and other global-scale institutions are struggling with economic nationalism and geopolitics, and bilateral and regional agreements are pressed by public disagreement and incompatibility with digital and capital and value chain flows, the megaregional ambition of TPP is increasingly important as a precedent requiring the close scrutiny this book presents.