Japan and the European Union, Pushing Forward Free Trade
After concluding negotiations in December 2017, European and Japanese officials announced the world’s largest free trade agreement (FTA), which would remove almost 99% of the tariffs between the European Union (EU) and Japan. On July 17th, 2018, at the EU-Japan summit in Tokyo, the two parties signed the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), bringing it closer to implementation. The EPA has been praised by the EU trade chief Cecilia Malmstrom as “the biggest trade agreement we have ever negotiated for the European Union”. More