The Scope And Coverage Of Government Procurement Agreement

China had made a commitment to join the "Government Procurement Agreement" (GPA), which will open up Chinese government procurement market, as soon as possible when China make an accession to the WTO in 2001. On December 28,2007, China has formally submitted initial offer to the WTO, marking the official opening of China in the negotiations of participating in GPA. But in the past three years, the accession negotiations with China has been slow, although China has submitted the bids twice in the list, but the bids have not been recognized by other parties. The core problem is the scope and coverage of the GPA.The first part of the article gave a general introduction of the scope and coverage of GPA, and summarizes the changes of GPA in the previous process of amending on scope and coverage and that meanwhile it shows the growing tread on the overall scope of coverage.In this paper, the scope and coverage of GPA was fully analyzed in both legal subject and object studies. In the legal subject study, the paper went through the case of Korea Incheon International Airport with many key points of the Panel, point out the content of the legal subject of scope and coverage of GPA is unclear, identify the legal subject of scope and coverage of GPA by summary and analyze the commitment lists by other parties, and raise how GPA is applicable to the newly established entities.In the legal object, the paper mainly discussed the government procurement behavior. Starting from the definition of the 2007 edition of GPA, it leads to two acts of government procurement elements:"government purpose" and "commercial sale exception. " First of all, the case of U. S. sonar mapping system is to determined the Panel proposed in the case criteria, and then followed by analysis of the GPA and the "commercial sale exception ", parts of which would make potential difficulties in the application. The author also introduces the scope of the legal object.Finally, the author summarized the current negotiations progress and the plight of China's accession to GPA, and he also brought recommendations on the strategy of the negotiation, and gave suggestions of improvements on China's government procurement legal system.