Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
section, we analyse the trade liberalisation schedules in China and ASEAN,
examining China's World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments, ASEAN
Free Trade Area (AFTA) commitments and the ACFTA commitments.
Chna's WTO commtments
After 15 years of arduous negotiations, China acceded to the WTO at the
end of 2001. As a result of the negotiations, China has agreed to undertake
a seres of commtments to lberalse ts trade polcy n order to better
ntegrate nto the world economy and offer a predctable envronment for
trade and foregn nvestment n accordance wth WTO rules.
3
Under ts
WTO commitments, China will further reduce its import tariffs on goods
and reduce or eliminate trade barriers on services. Other prohibitions,
quanttatve restrctons or protectve measures used aganst mports that
are nconsstent wth WTO agreements wll be phased out or otherwse
dealt wth n accordance wth mutually agreed terms.
Import tarffs wll be reduced gradually between 2001 and 2010. Based
on the Harmonised Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) tariff
schedules of the protocol of Chna's WTO accesson and weghted by 2001
import data from the United Nations Statistics Division, Commodity Trade
Statistics Database (COMTRADE), China's average import tariff will be
reduced gradually from 8.79 per cent in 2001 to 5.43 per cent in 2010.
4
The
scheduled import tariff reductions—by commodity and year—are provided
in Table A13.1. As there is no tariff line in the services sector, it is difficult
to estimate the liberalisation directly. In the empirical analysis, we adopt
the estimate of Tongeren and Huang (2004) and Francois and Spinager
(2004) that the mport tarff equvalent of Chna's servces sector wll be
reduced from 19 per cent to 9 per cent.
Chna wll confront consderable challenges n ts lberalsaton of the
agricultural sector. In addition to the agreed tariff reductions, China
committed to removing quantitative restrictions, phasing out all export
subsidies and reducing product-specific support to 8.5 per cent.
5
Although
Chna's WTO agreement allows the government to manage the trade
of 'natonal strategc products'
6
through a tariff rate quota (TRQ), the
quotas under low tarffs wll be expanded whle the shares of state-owned
enterprses (SOEs) wll be reduced gradually.
