On Domestic Regulation Provisions Of Japanese Economic Partnership Agreements

Recently,as the multilateral negotiations under WTO have reached an impasse,nations tend to liberalize trade regionally instead, which further intensifies theconflicts between regional and multilateral agreements. As an active participator inregional economic integration, Japan has a group of distinguishing EconomicPartnership Agreements. This article takes the domestic regulation provisions inJapan’s EPAs as its main focus point, analyses different modes of domestic regulationprovisions in Japan’s EPAs and compares them with corresponding provision inGATS. Analyzing comparatively, this article summarizes various situations in whichdomestic regulation provision in EPAs conflict with that in GATS, i.e. differentdegrees of obligation and different provisions on the same subjects. To solve thisconflict, this article takes the conflict clause and treaty interpretation as possibleway-out. In addition, this article also studies the feasibility of conflict clause andtreaty interpretation in situations where China’s FTAs has a conflict with multilateraleconomic agreement.This article can be divided into six parts.The first part generally introduces the domestic provisions in Japan’s EPAs,analyzes the constituent parts of specific norms on trade in service and theirsignificant effects.This part also introduces the basic theory of domestic regulation.The second part analyzes the text of domestic regulation in Japan’s EPAs,comparing the GATS mode provisions and NAFTA mode ones.It comes to aconclusion that legal conflicts arise out of the differences between different modes ofdomestic regulation provisions as well as between EPAs and GATS. The third part defines the conflict of laws by comparing different concept intheory. According to this definition, this article summarizes two situations wheredomestic regulation provisions in Japan’s EPAs conflict with that in GATS.The fourth part focuses on the solution of legal conflict, including conflict clausein EPAs and multilateral agreements, and the interpretation method referred in Article31of VCLT.The fifth part sheds some light on the FTAs of China, especially on thenegotiation of China, Japan and Korea FTA and on the conflict between China FTAand GATS.The sixth part comes to a conclusion.