China and EU back to talking business

China and the EU have agreed to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty to boost access to each other’s markets in a sign their relationship remains steady despite recent trade tensions, Financial Times reported. The announcement came at the end of an annual bilateral summit in Beijing on Thursday with the two sides’ leaders pledging to increase bilateral trade from about US$580 billion in 2012 to US$1 trillion by 2020. A final pact is likely to be two or three years away but will be the first such EU-wide investment agreement negotiated by the bloc since it gained powers to do so under the Lisbon Treaty, enacted in 2009.