The Compliance Monitoring And Assessment Of International Trade Agreements:the Machanism And Practice Of The United States

Nowadays, bilateral, regional and multilateral trade agreements are showing significant growth, and an increasing number of countries have concluded international trade agreements while the range of international trade agreements is becoming wider and wider. International trade agreements are, as a matter of fact, international economic contracts with countries as actors, thus, compliance is the key link which is very important to realize the purpose of concluding international trade agreements. According to traditional and general regulations of international trade agreements, if a government accedes to an international trade agreement on the premise that the agreement will promote cooperation with other countries and is in line with that country's interests, compliance should be a rational and basic behavior of every member. Thus, violations should be rare exceptions, and so long as dispute settlement mechanism, whose main means are appropriate sanctions and compensation, has been included in the clause of an international trade agreement, then violations can be stopped in advance and get punishment if they had happened. Therefore, the current research relating to compliance issues of international trade agreements focuses on the cases where members have had non-compliance activities, that is, the dispute settlement when the consequences of non-compliance activities had appeared. But to the problem of compliance itself, especially the reasons and preventive mechanism of compliance, there lacks a comprehensive and in-depth research.This dissertation uses the basic principles of trade political economy and international regime theory to explain and elaborate the three basic elements of international trade agreements theoretically and separately, namely motivations, connotation and principle, and compliance, and from a theoretical point of view discusses the main reasons of concluding international trade agreements, the content and type of international trade agreements, the fundamental factors affecting members' compliance, and basic approaches for member to comply with the agreement in detail. Based on a detailed case study, this dissertation analyzes the general monitoring and assessment mechanism of international trade agreement compliance in the United States, the key member of WTO which has relatively perfect management system of international trade agreements. On this basis, this dissertation analyzes the U.S. monitoring and assessment mechanism of China's WTO commitments. At last, according to China's current situation and the U.S. experience, this dissertation tries to put forward some suggestions on the establishment of a monitoring and assessment mechanism of international trade agreements compliance in China.From the perspective of traditional economics and political economy, the main reasons to conclude international trade agreements for a country are as follows, exchanging market access, resolving time-inconsistency problems and triggering the domestic support. Main factors affecting a country's compliance consist of the structure and the nature of the problem itself, size and structure of the contracting members, and domestic structure and capacity of a contracting party. It can make members comply with international trade agreements through monitoring and assessing compliance and taking measures to rectify non-compliance.The U.S. has a relatively perfect management system of international trade agreements. It has established monitoring and assessment mechanism since the 90's, and has formed an organizational system of interagency and multi-level coordination, with the U.S. Trade Representative Office as the core, plus government departments and enterprises. The key four agencies to monitor and assess the international trade agreement compliance are U.S. Trade Representative, Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture, and Department of the State. In these four agencies there are specific departments in charge of monitoring and enforcement, and they coordinate the work with each other. While monitoring China's WTO commitment, these agencies restructured or established some new interagency teams to improve the monitoring and the implementation results, meanwhile they receive financial and resources support from the government. Besides, the Congress and the private sector are also involved in monitoring and enforcement work. Generally speaking, the compliance monitoring and assessment system of United States is relatively perfect and division of labor is clear, and to some extent it's effective. Also the monitoring and assessment procedures and annual reports required by law are helpful to carry out the work of monitoring and assessment more effectively. For the monitoring and assessment of China's WTO commitment, whether the mechanism itself or its results, they all reflect American national strategies. After accession to WTO, negotiating free trade area has become a new strategy of opening up in China. But with the approach of the tenth anniversary of China's accession to WTO, and the increase of free trade areas, it gradually reveals that China only concerns about the negotiations of trade agreements, but neglects monitoring and assessment compliance of itself and its trade partners. So China is lack of prejudgment about trade partners'monitoring and assessment results, and has no counter-proposal to their pressure. Thus, when facing trade partners' requests based upon their monitoring and assessment results, China's overall behavior is passive adjustment. Therefore, China should attach importance to agreement compliance of other members, learn the mature experience from developed countries, and try to establish the compliance monitoring and assessment mechanism of international trade agreements, in order to ensure full rights of trade agreements and trade benefits, as well as responding actively to the China's non-compliance criticism from partners.