The Impacts Of SPS Measures On China's Agricultural Exports

After its WTO accession, China's trades of many products have been greatly promoted. As one big agricultural country, China's bilateral trade in food and agricultural products has grown dramatically since then. Until now, China has been a WTO member for about 4 years; however, there is no huge increase of bilateral agricultural trades as had been predicted by experts. The main reason lies in the fact that, the SPS measures mainly limit the exports of labor-intensive agricultural products. And China has a comparative advantage in these products.With the developing of modern international trade, free trade has been achieved in many countries. The free exchanges of products not only bring the trade of products, but also lead to the spreading of various epidemic diseases. In order to limit the negative impacts of trade, many countries have implemented SPS measures to inspect the goods entering and leaving the country and prevent the epidemics from getting into the country.For so many years, multilateral agricultural negotiations have been developed. With the liberalization procession of agricultural trade, WTO has been promoting the open-up of all the member countries actively by reducing tariff and quotas. With the vanishing of these trade protection methods, member countries have learned to protect trade by the invisible barriers like SPS measures to protect its agricultural industry. Because the main effects these measures have are on labor-intensive agricultural products and China's comparative advantages lies in labor-intensive products, China's agricultural exports have failed to reach the expectations of experts.This paper intends to discuss the impact SPS measures have on China's agricultural...