The Trend Of FTA Competition Policy And China’s Countermeasures Study

Although competition is a domestic issue, with the development of the global economic integration, the International Communities calling for the unity of competition policy in the multilateral trade mechanism is almost as loud. Competition policy has been an important issue in the new round of the multilateral trade negotiations. Competition policy was first proposed in the1996Singapore Ministerial Conference. In2001,the4th WTO Ministerial Conference decided to add the competition issue to the work program of the Doha Round. However, this issue was dropped at the5th Ministerial Conference due to the WTO member’s differences, especially the developing country’ opposition. Although there is no result within the framework of WTO, competition policy has attracted extensive attention in the world. The coordination of competition policy is not blocked by the WTO negotiation. On the contrary, with the developed countries’ efforts, there are many competition policy cooperation mechanisms, such as bilateral, regional, and multilateral cooperation mechanism, especially, the coordination in the Free Trade Agreements(FTA) has made great achievement. Untile the June2012, according to the WTO notification, there are522FTA including100FTA with competition provision. China is trying to become conform with international convention, so we should pay more attention on the trends of the competition policy and take countermeasures.This paper classifies the100FTA and introduces16representative FTA (including EU, EU’s FTA accounting for14%of all the FTA with competition policy). This article is divided into six sections. The first part is introduction, in this chapter this paper mainly introduce the significance of this article and the relating research. And the following section is the introduction of the competition policy compared with the competition law and clarifies that the competition policy in this paper is the generalized competition policy. Then this section mainly focus on the explanation of the relationship between competition policy and trade policy. The third part adopts the empirical method to introduce the FTA competition policy which includes the four biggest FTA (EU, NAFTA, NSEAN, MERCOSUR), and some other FTA active countries. This paper classifies the FTA into three types (N-N, N-S, S-S) and makes a summary. The following section is based on the analysis of FTA and makes the forecast to the trend of the FTA competition policy. The fifth chapter is about China’s countermeasures. The last chapter is the conclusion of this study.The main innovations of this paper are as follows:First, Many scholars examine the competition policy from the legal perspective or from the WTO multilateral cooperation view. As the country’s competition policy is diversified, what’s more, many developing countries have not competition policy, it’s too early to involve the competition policy in the WTO mechanism. Therefore, involving the competition policy in the FTA is more realistic. With the development of the FTA competition policy, it will be included in the WTO framework but not now or not recent years. Second, many scholars just analysis the EU and the United States’s competition policy with little regard to the participation of the developing countries. In fact, the North-Soth type FTA accounted for more than40%of all the FTA with competition policy, and this kind of FTA will continue to increase. However, this paper introduces both North-South and South-South type FTA from the perspective of FTA to analysis the trends of the competition policy. Based on the analysis of the FTA, this paper predicts that the developing country will increase the FTA with competition policy. What’s more, the competition policy in FTA will be deepen in context. China should actively participate in the FTA international cooperation in competition policy. Third, scholars mainly focus on how to learn from the other countries to improve our national competition policy. However, this article is mainly to study how to deal with the FTA negotiates concerning the competition policy, and proposed countermeasures for the FTA negotiation.