The Development Of Regional Trade Agreements And China's Countermeasures

Regional Trade Agreements(RTAs) are a major feature of today's economic globalization. The number of preferential agreements as well as the world share of preferential trade has been steadily increasing over the last ten years. Sluggish progress in multilateral trade negotiations under the Doha Development Round appears to have accelerated further the rush to forge RTAs. RTA activities have intensified across all world regions particularly in the Western Hemisphere and Asia-Pacific.The development of RTAs is driven by a variety of factors which include economic, political and security considerations. The conclusion of RTAs may be driven by the search for access to larger markets, which might be easier to engineer at the regional or bilateral level, particularly in the absence of a willingness among WTO Members to liberalize further on a multilateral basis. Some countries argue that their participation in RTAs provides a competitive spur to liberalization at the multilateral level by promoting trade liberalization on multiple fronts, while others may increasingly be drawn into RTAs for defensive reasons, as a means of maintaining market access opportunities in the absence of MFN-driven liberalization. Political considerations are also a key to the decision to foster...