Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
06
The impact of China's
WTO accession on regional
economies
Tingsong Jiang
China was admitted to the WTO in November 2001, after making
commtments far beyond those most member economes agreed to when
they joined (Lardy 2002). The accession ended a 15-year long and difficult
negotiation process. However, the discussion of the impact of China's
accesson on the domestc economy and on the world economy has only
just begun.
Many studies discuss the impact of China's accession using general
equilibrium models, because these models enable panoramic analysis of
economy-wde effects.
1
These studies share the view that, overall, China will
achieve gains in economic efficiency but that agriculture, the auto industry
and the bankng system are vulnerable sectors.
Few studies have tried to investigate the impact of WTO accession
on regional development. Yang and Huang (1997) and Jiang (2002a) use
dfferent types of representatve households to approxmate the regonal
impacts of trade liberalisation and WTO accession. Diao, Fan and Zhang
(2002) and Dao et al (2002) present a general equlbrum model wth partal
disaggregation, that is, distinguishing nine different regions but only for
the agricultural sectors. Fan and Zheng (2000, 2001) discuss the regional
impact of trade liberalisation in their PRCGEM model following the top-
down approach. However, their analysis is incomplete because it attributes
the regonal mpact only to the dfference n sectoral composton. One
