On The Safeguards In International Trade

Safeguard measures are restrictions on import which are taken by a government under certain conditions. They are fair trade remedies and signs of trade protection. In recent years, more and more safeguard measures were taken by WTO members. Before China became a member of WTO, she had no related law or regulations, study on safeguard is also at early stage. However, in only 2 years from China's WTO accession, several products of China have been targeted by safeguard measures of other WTO members. China's commitments on "transitional product-specific mechanism" in the Protocol on the Accession of the People's Republic of China and "special safeguard on textiles and apparel products" in the Report of the Working Party on the Accession of China are now becoming a barrier to the exports of China. It is urgent and meaningful to study this issue.In this dissertation, beginning with the history of the safeguard measures, I thoroughly discussed safeguard-related issues, as well as specific safeguard measures on the product of China in four chapters. And finally I drew a conclusion on the development of safeguard issues in the future.Chapter 1 outlines the origin of safeguard measures. The 1st section of this chapter explores the definition and types of these measures, and specifically focuses on the safeguard measures on products from China. It also examines the characteristic of these measures and illustrates that, different from anti-dumping and countervailing measures, safeguard measures target fair trade activities in the international trade, they have higher application standards, their application shall be applied to a product on MFN basis, and those affected members can take compensation for the adverse effects of the measures on their trade. The last part of this section discusses the history of safeguard measures. It covers the origin of safeguard regulations(US "escape clause", its development in different periods of US history, and its development in several rounds of negotiations after it was introduced into the GATT, the "gray area", and the Agreement on Safeguards reached in Uruguay Round. The 2nd section introduces and analyzes 5 theories which support the safeguards. They are "Restoring Competitiveness", "Orderly Contraction", "Equity and Redistribution", "Safety Valve" and "Public Choice". I also showed my support for the last two theories. Chapter 2 takes up the safeguards under the WTO legal system. In this chapter, the proliferation of safeguard measures in trade agreements is introduced and analyzed, including Article 19 of GATT 1994( the outline of the legal basis to safeguard measures, Agreement on Safeguards( the result after many debates in several negotiation rounds and one of the achievements of Uruguay Round, Article 6 of Agreement on Textiles and Clothing(hereinafter "ATC")(transitional safeguard specifically targeting textile and clothing products and Article 5 of Agreement on Agriculture. The content, meaning and development of several important articles are analyzed in depth. Besides, the other section turns to the analyses on safeguard cases under the WTO. Up to now, there are 7 related cases settled by Appellate Body, which are "Argentina-Footwear", "Korea-Dairy", "US-Wheat Gluten", "US-Cotton Yarn", "US-Line Pipe" and recent "US-Steel". I thoroughly analyzed all of above cases and gave my comments, summarized the clarification on several important legal terms, including "extraordinary nature of safeguard measures", "increased import", "serious injury and threat of serious injury", "causation", "domestic industry", "parallelism in investigation and application", "the application on developing country", "the 'no attribution' requirement on other factors", "reasoned and adequate explanation", "standard of review", and etc. Also, I made clear several application requirements, such as: Agreement on Safeguards does not require that increased import per se causes serious injury ; "unforeseen development", as a matter of fac...