Europe And The United States Barriers To Trade Survey System

Since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 and the development of trade liberalization led by WTO, a new trend of trade protectionism comes into being in the field of international trade. Non-tariff barriers gradually replace tariff barriers and become the most important trade protection tool. Due to the limitations of multilateral trade system, a large number of newly-emerging trade barriers can not be included and regulated effectively. In this circumstance, with the Section 301 of and the New Commercial Policy Instrument as their respective milestone, the United States and European Community have established trade barrier investigation mechanisms, in order to protect their own legitimate trade interests under international agreements, maintain the interests of domestic industry and improve the environments for international trade and investment. After years of implementation, the legislation and practices of the trade barrier investigation regulations of these two countries become nearly perfect, and are proved to be effective in their application fields.In recent years, especially after the entry into WTO, China's domestic industry is facing great challenges of foreign trade barriers. Therefore, the Chinese government issued Foreign Trade Barriers Investigation Regulation in 2004, making China the third country establishes trade barriers investigation system after the United States and the EC. However, we should notice that compare to U.S. and EC's regulations, the legislation of China's regulation is not yet perfect, and also lacks practical experience.This thesis gives a summary of the legislations and practical experience of U.S. and EC's trade barriers investigation systems. At the same time, it also discusses the entity and legislation of China's Foreign Trade Barriers Investigation Regulation, and China's first case of trade barriers investigation, the "Laver case" between China and Japan. The comparison between China and U.S and European legislation provides us with useful reference for the improvement of China's trade barriers investigation system. This thesis consists of five parts. The first part gives an overview of the emergence and development of U.S. and EC's trade barriers investigation mechanisms. The second and the third part expatiate on the substantial and procedural regulations of U.S. and EC's trade barriers investigation mechanisms. Through the comparison of these two regulations, we can find their respective characteristics and the issue of its coexistence with multilateral dispute settlement mechanism, and summarize their respective experience and shortages. The fourth part focuses on the implementations of these regulations under WTO dispute settlement mechanism, and gives a summary of the relations between the two systems and WTO dispute settlement mechanism and their interactions. The last part expatiate on China's trade barriers investigation mechanism. Through the discussion of its substantial and procedural regulations and the comparison with U.S and European legislation, the author attempts to find out flaws in the legislation of China's trade barrier investigation mechanism and put forward suggestions on further improvement of this mechanism, which bears certain theoretical and practical significance.