Brussels, 12/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - The latest report by the WTO on China's trade policy, made public on Tuesday 12 June, confirms that little change has been made to policies conducted by Beijing on foreign imports and investment in that country since 2009.
Applied MFN tariffs remain close to China's bound rates, and the simple average applied is unchanged at 9.5%. Beijing uses various non-tariff border measures such as import and export licensing and state trading to “guide” the allocation of resources, WTO states in a summary of the report. Although notice-and-comment procedures are becoming more prevalent in the process of drafting trade laws, “it seems that not all trade-related information is made available to the public”, the organisation points out.
Subsidies and other government assistance are important features of China's trade policy and industrial policy making, the report underlines, deploring the lack of figures on the magnitude of support provided, and regretting that there is no information available on subsidies and other government assistance provided between 2005 and 2008, despite notification of such programmes in 2011.
Also criticised is the fact that China's institutional and procedural framework on anti-dumping has not changed since 2009, that agricultural support programmes have been on the increase which distort competition, and also there is so much complexity in the Chinese export regime and application of measures to regulate certain exports, such as restrictions on arable land for environmental reasons.
The opening up of China's public procurement is also brought into question. Although China is becoming a party to the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), for which it submitted a revised offer end 2011, “it would appear that local governments account for a major part of government procurement in China, but no data are available on their procurement activities”, the organisation notes. China assures, however, that there is no longer any condition attached to government procurement regarding “indigenous innovation”.
Although the number of China's public companies has fallen since 2009, they continue to “remain dominant in certain sectors and subsectors that are vital to the national economy”.
China has nonetheless made a number of noteworthy and encouraging steps forward, on one hand with regard to the protection of intellectual property rights, with the promulgation or amendment since 2009 of a number of laws, regulations and administrative rules (copyright law, the implementation regulation for the patent law, and the regulation on customs protection of intellectual property). Furthermore, when it comes to opening up to foreign investment, with review of its indicative catalogue of production branches for the purposes of foreign investment, the new version which took effect early 2012 has done away with the ceilings on foreign capital participation for 11 subsectors. (EH/transl.jl)