IPEF Ministerial Conference aims to reach basic agreement on three main areas

 Fourteen countries, including Japan, the United States and South Korea, which are continuing negotiations on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) for a new economic circle, will hold a ministerial meeting in San Francisco, West of the United States, on November 13 and 14 and are expected to reach a general agreement on three major areas, including fair economy, according to sources interviewed on November 11. Launched in May last year with the idea of counterbalancing China, the US-led framework will produce its first comprehensive results.

The ministerial meeting will be held on the same day as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, which starts on December 12. Chief negotiators from each country are in the final stages of negotiations. Some topics, such as digital trade, have been postponed, and the parties have stepped up efforts to formulate international rules conducive to the economic development of the Indo-Pacific region to the extent that they can be implemented.

The IPEF includes four areas: trade, supply chain, clean economy and fair economy, and will set high-level rules on numerical targets for tackling climate change and preventing corruption. The ministerial meeting is expected to basically agree on three of these areas, and the other is to strengthen the supply chain of important materials before the actual compromise.

Digital trade is part of the "trade" field, and due to concerns in the United States that the development of relevant rules such as data flow or lead to the concentration of benefits to IT corporate giants, the United States government has actually changed its course and suspended negotiations on digital trade.

In the trade area, "it is difficult to reach a comprehensive agreement" (negotiations related to the words), and it is expected to be limited to rationalizing the overall trade process, which the United States intends to regard as a basic settlement.

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