| With the development of economic globalization and the deepening of trade liberalization, the use of tariff barriers and traditional non-tariff barriers has been gradually weakened, and the application of technical barriers to trade are becoming more and more widespread. In international trade, a country use TBT in order to ensure national security or prevent fraud, protect human health and safety, the life and health of animals and plants, environmental protection, respect for cultural and traditional customs.The formation of technical barriers to trade has its specific historical background. Firstly, it's the needs of solving market failure. Because of the existence of information asymmetries and external effects in social and economic activities, market failure happens and allocation of resources is inefficient and ineffective. So it's necessary for the government to take technical measures to intervene the market distortions for improving production efficiency and realizing optimal allocation of resources.\Secondly, it's the need of international trade protectionism. Trade protectionists believe that free trade policy is not healthy for the formation of industry chain if their country's industries are still in the initial stages. So the government should use subsidies, tariffs policy and incentives to protect domestic infant industries until they get competitive advantages.Now the EU is China's largest trading partner, and recently years the structure of China's exports to the EU has also significant changed, a gradual shift form low value-added agricultural and textile products to high value-added electrical and high-tech products. The EU initially use technical barriers in international trade and because most of its members enjoy higher economic development and advanced technologies, they often set high-level technical threshold and demanding technical standards to restrict even prohibit China' exports enter the EU market.especially for the mechanical and electric products., WEEE and EuP directives were punished in 2005 and RoHS directive came into effect in 2006, all these directives ask for an extremely strict requirement to environmental performance of product form design, production processes, product maintenance to final waste recycling so as to reduce damage to the environment. Thus, these directives are also called "Green Directives"The EU's strict technical barriers have two different aspects on the impact of China's export of mechanical and electrical products. In short term, it will increase costs and weaken competitiveness, resulting in deteriorating terms of trade, and reduction of exports. However, in the long run, when facing the barriers, if China's export enterprises are able to actively carry out technological innovation and adopt international standards, it's possible to conquer the EU'technical barriers, enhance core competitiveness, improve terms of trade and ultimately achieve substantial breakthrough.This paper consists of five parts. The first part discusses the basic concepts, characteristics, theoretical basis of technical barriers to trade. The second part mainly discusses the economic analysis of technical barriers'influences to exports of mechanical and electrical products, which is divided into short-term analysis and long-term analysis. The third part analyzes the major EU technical barriers and points out the impacts. Part IV analyzes internal and external reasons that why China's mechanical and electrical products suffer EU'technical barriers to trade. The last part pays great attention to strategies that we should take on the macro-level and micro-level in order to overcome EU'technical barriers to trade. |
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