Gains and hurdles for China to join the comprehensive and progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific partnership

Purpose The current version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), known as Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TPP (CPTPP) has opened itself to new membership. China formally applied to join the CPTPP Free Trade Agreement. With respect to China joining the CPTPP, some groups of researchers have argued that China’s accession would be a win-win situation for both China and CPTPP member countries. On the contrary, a group of researchers has argued that there would not be any significant gain to member countries of CPTPP. Analysis in this paper is restricted to examining the economic benefits to China by joining the CPTPP. The paper aims to make conjectures about what are the challenges China must face nationally and internationally to join CPTPP. Design/methodology/approach The methodology and the approach to do the empirical analysis concern using the stochastic frontier gravity model and the panel data covering the period 1995–2022 from the World Integrated Trade Solution developed by the World Bank. Findings The empirical results reveal that the CPTPP membership will facilitate China to improve its export efficiency in merchandise exports with the CPTPP member countries. Originality/value Though there are a few discussions on the accession of China to CPTPP, quantitative analysis of examining the impact of China joining the CPTPP on its export efficiency with the members of CPTPP has not been explicitly discussed in the literature. This study’s contribution is to fill this gap in the literature.