This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 13th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A new trade agreement between Japan and Europe is in the works.

It may not be as big as NAFTA was for North America, but it signals

that trade won't slow down across the globe just because an avowed protection sits in the White

House. Simon Lester, trade policysts at the Cato Institute, discusses the

developing agreement and its likely impact.

The EU-Japan Trade Agreement, first of all it's an agreement in principle right now. It's not actually completed.

They've given us some information about what's going to be in it. Basically it involves the core trade issue of lowering tariffs,

so the Europeans would like to export more cheese to Japan and

Japan has agreed to lower tariffs on cheese for example and Japanese would like to

export more cars to Europe and Europe has agreed to lower tariffs on cars.

And this has sort of been the basics of trade agreements for centuries and it's a good thing.

It's free trade.

The trade agreement also involves some more cutting edge innovative things like liberalization

of trade and services, which is more complicated.

It's not clear at this point how much it achieves in this regard.

We haven't seen all of the full details, but it's going to make some progress in those areas.

So I mean, basically the EU-Japan Trade Agreement is nothing innovative.

It's just what everybody does in trade negotiations these days.

But it was presented at least by a few people as a big deal of the scale, potentially, of NAFTA. And you say that's just not true.

I don't think that's true because the US candidate in Mexico are neighbors and are some

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