Legal Regulation On Free Trade Area Under GATT Article ⅩⅩⅣ

Economic globalization and regional economic integration are twosignificant characteristics in the world today. After the Second WorldWar, economic globalization began to develop in the world, variouscountries and regions, especially developing countries, actively respondto the opportunities and challenges brought by economic globalization.However, the level of development among countries, geographical factorsand cultural traditions, and other reasons affect the progress of economicglobalization. The failure of the WTO’s Seattle Ministerial Conference in1999to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations beckons toa certain extent implies the multilateral trading system is in trouble. At thesame time, regional economic integration became a prominent trends andphenomena. Since the1990s, the regional economic integrationagreements mainly aiming at free trade area have been throughout thevarious regions of the world, the global free trade area has developedrapidly, more and more countries mention the development of free tradearea as important as the multilateral trade even more priority. As a tradingpower, China’s active participation in regional economic integration,which is particularly important for improving the degree ofopenness in the country as well as achieving the optimal allocation ofnational resources. In this sense, it is obviously very important to studythe legal rules of the multilateral trading system on the Free Trade Area.The writing of this paper is also based on this purpose.The first part introduces the main legal rules of the multilateraltrading system on regional economic integration, namely the origin andevolution of GATT Art. XXIV, and the rapid development of the freetrade areas.The second part based on establishment reasons of GATT Art.XXIV analyze the relationship between the multilateral trading systemand free trade area.The third part mainly makes the analysis of the Legal Regulation ofGATT Art. XXIV on the free trade areas taking china as an example.The fourth part deals with the currently existing deficiencies andrequired improvements of GATT Art. XXIV, and proposed GATT Art.XXIV has guiding significance for the future development of China’s freetrade area.