This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 6, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The newly unveiled a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement will create a large trading block across the Pacific

Ocean, but there's at least one notable country not included, China.

Dan Eekinson, director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute comments.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement between 12 countries on four continents.

Those countries comprise about one-third of global

trade flows and about 40% of global GDP. And yet the United States is involved, some

other Asian countries are involved, but China is involved but China is not.

China is not.

In fact at the outset of the expression of US interest in this enterprise, the

TPP was sort of the economic centerpiece of the US pivot to Asia and it was

pitched within the administration as an undertaking to show that we're back,

despite 10 years of misadventure in the Middle East

and a lack of attention on other issues, we're back and we are here to sort of check China's rise.

And I always thought that that was a pretty bad way to characterize this, so there's no need to be provocative like that.

And ultimately, we want China to be in this agreement.

It will be much more economically meaningful.

And ultimately, I think we will get China in this deal. It might not be called the TPP.

It might be called a free trade area of the Asia Pacific, and that might happen in a few years.

There are several countries that want to join the TPP right away.

So China could be added at any time or these other countries could be added later. Yeah, they could be added later. China is probably a few years away at least. There are a lot of laws and regulations that will need to be sort of revamped to bring up standards,

...