EU, Japan Sign Historic Free Trade Deal After Rush to Agree Terms before Brexit

Local Editor

The European Union and Japan are signing a widespread trade deal that will eliminate nearly all tariffs, seemingly defying the worries about trade tensions set off by US President Donald Trump's policies. 

The signing in Tokyo on Tuesday for the deal, largely reached late last year, is ceremonial.

It was delayed from earlier this month because Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cancelled going to Brussels over a disaster in southwestern Japan, caused by extremely heavy rainfall in which more than 200 people died from flooding and landslides. 

European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who arrived Monday, will also attend a gala dinner at the prime minister's official residence. 

Both sides are heralding the deal, which covers a third of the global economy and more than 600 million people. 

The deal eliminates about 99 percent of the tariffs on Japanese goods to the EU, but remaining at around 94 percent for European imports into Japan for now and rising to 99 percent over the years.

The US is proposing 10 per cent tariffs on a $200bn list of Chinese goods. That follows an earlier move by Washington to impose 25 per cent tariffs on $34bn of Chinese goods. Beijing has responded by imposing identical penalties on a similar amount of American imports. 

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team