KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 24 — Malaysia can reduce the impact of open trade on the domestic market when the Trans-Pacific Partnership 

(TPP) Agreement kicks in by coming up with a blueprint for the service sector, the country representative for the World Bank said today.

Faris Hadad-Zervos said the one certainty when the TPP rolls out in 2018 is that people will lose jobs, but stressed that there were ways to minimise the fallout.

"In any trade agreements, there will be losers...people will lose jobs but there are ways to minimise this impact for a level playing field”, he said at the King’s Discourse on the thorny subject organised by the King’s College London Alumni of Malaysia and the Columbia University Alumni Association and held at the The Ritz-Carlton Hotel here.

Faris named four sectors the government should consider in its ratification process before the TPP comes to play, and emphasised that the service sector, which takes up a big chunk of the trade market, must be improved.

"Malaysia must ensure this sector is improved. We would suggest implementing a service blueprint to facilitate trade in the open market,” he said.

He also noted it was a necessity to establish investment and competition policies.

"Malaysia will need to come up with a mechanism to handle investors and conduct regulatory analysis to ensure it was on par with its partners in the trade agreement,” he asserted.

Malaysia signed the free trade pact with 11 other countries in February.

The TPP was agreed on the basis to strengthen economic collaboration by reducing or eliminating trade tariffs among these nations, which among other consist of the United States, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

Critics are of the opinion that the TPP would bring more advantages to the bigger nation like the US than the smaller economy countries.

Some even claimed the TPP was a way for US to oversee the market of China through countries like Malaysia that currently has strong ties with its Chinese counterpart.