Secondary Isotropic Standard Of Countervailing Legal System To Explore

Anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguards measures may be applied by WTO members to protect their domestic enterprises or industries when certain imported products has caused or threatened to cause serious injury to these enterprises or industries. After China joined WTO, we have encountered a lot of anti-dumping investigations. Correspondingly, considerable importance has been attached to the study of anti-dumping measures, there has been so many articles studying it that we have known it quite well. On the contrary, the anti-subsidy measures have not been given enough attention. One of the reasons is that China is regarded as non-market economy which is not considered to be subject to anti-subsidy measures.But in 2004, Canada became the first county that applied the anti-subsidy measures to China. Then in 2006 the Department of Commerce of the USA initiated countervailing duty investigations towards coated free sheet paper imported from China, which was quite out of our expectation and broke the long-time tradition not applying countervailing duty law to non-market economy. As an economy giant, the USA's trade policies have tremendous influence upon other countries. We believe that more and more anti-subsidy investigations will be applied to our export products in other countries, especially in the USA. Under this circumstance, we must pay more attention to the studies of anti-subsidy measures in order to be well prepared to face this new challenge. This thesis is focused on the study of Specificity Principle which is the most important issue of the anti-subsidy law. It's the standard by which we may find out the very subsidy that is subject to the law.This thesis is composed of four chapters which is organized as follows:Chapter one states the basic knowledge of the system of Subsidy and Anti-subsidy, which is the foundation of Specificity Principle. At first I introduce the definition of subsidy and its classification. The second part of this chapter is mainly about the definition of anti-subsidy and its history.Chapter two is the most important part of this article. It focuses on the all-sided study of the Specificity Principle which includes the introduction of its history, its development from law-specificity investigation to both law and fact investigation, the law provisions in the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures and the countervailing duty law of the USA, the analysis of related law issues, the significance of the Principle, and its supplement as well. Chapter three analyses the 6 newly initiated anti-subsidy investigations in the USA which are applied to China's export products. The purpose of this analysis is to seek further and deeper comprehension of the Specificity Principle which also acts as the basis for next chapter.Based on the analysis of the 6 anti-subsidy investigation applied by the USA government, Chapter four mainly discusses the responding strategies that we may use. On the one hand, we may request consultations with USA under WTO rules, furthermore we may refer this matter to the Dispute Settlement Body, during the same time we could also appeal the investigation in International Trade court of the USA in order to clarify the unclear part of the USA's countervailing law. On the other hand, we have to change our own policies that do not match the requirements of the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures and bestow specific benefit upon certain enterprises or industries. In the end, some important regulations of the USA countervailing law are pointed out, which are important and have to be taken into account when responding the anti-subsidy investigation initiated by the USA government.