Suchergebnisse

An assumption in the EU trade policy debate is that European business makes an essential contribution to the evolution and content of EU trade policy. The article contributes to this discussion in analysing the ways in which trade policy lobbying positions are developed within industry associations at the EU level. It identifies a potential lack of input and interest of European business in current trade policy issues, which raises a set of challenges for further research on business involvement in EU trade policy.

Amid increasing headwinds, EU trade policy should focus less on the 'invisible hand', more on the hand of friendship.

Comment on Trade and Investment: An American Perspective by G. Hufbauer and F. Neumann Old and New Issues in EC-US Trade Disputes by André Sapir

Designing its trade policy towards China, Europe should exert extreme foresightedness. Rather than to be trapped in bilateral trade balance conflicts (economically meaningless and politically hopeless), the EU should push for objectives that are attractive to its own interests, and to Chinese interests - China's economy is already too large to be influenced exclusively from outside. In this perspective, the paper offers five main proposals. * Concerning trade in goods, the EU should aim at a 'joint better enforcement' of China's WTO Accession Protocol - granting China the market economy status in antidumping investigation while getting from China clarification, confirmation, and other marginal improvements of its tariff schedule as back. * The EU should narrow down its requests on intellectual property rights to limited range, which deliver true innovations and benefits to both European producers and Chinese consumers. * The EU should focus on services and foreign investment, by proposing an early and progressive elimination of the special safeguard instrument against Chinese exporters in exchange for additional commitments from China in services and investment. * The EU should re-focus its trade policy on the WTO, away from bilateral trade agreements. Such agreements amplify incentives among Asian countries to negotiate bilaterals between themselves, by the same token risking further marginalizing the EU. And they tend to segment even more the Chinese provincial markets, while the WTO approach would reinforce the emerging 'Chinese Single Market'. * Improving the functioning of its domestic markets would make the EU more resistant to the increasing size of the Chinese economy, for instance, in the energy or financial sectors. Such an ambitious program has no chance to succeed if it does not fill two conditions. First, it should keep a clear economic focus. Trade negotiators are not credible when they tackle political issues. Second, the EU should work with other players in the world. As such cooperation should ...

Designing its trade policy towards China, Europe should exert extreme foresightedness. Rather than to be trapped in bilateral trade balance conflicts (economically meaningless and politically hopeless), the EU should push for objectives that are attractive to its own interests, and to Chinese interests - China's economy is already too large to be influenced exclusively from outside. In this perspective, the paper offers five main proposals. * Concerning trade in goods, the EU should aim at a 'joint better enforcement' of China's WTO Accession Protocol - granting China the market economy status in antidumping investigation while getting from China clarification, confirmation, and other marginal improvements of its tariff schedule as back. * The EU should narrow down its requests on intellectual property rights to limited range, which deliver true innovations and benefits to both European producers and Chinese consumers. * The EU should focus on services and foreign investment, by proposing an early and progressive elimination of the special safeguard instrument against Chinese exporters in exchange for additional commitments from China in services and investment. * The EU should re-focus its trade policy on the WTO, away from bilateral trade agreements. Such agreements amplify incentives among Asian countries to negotiate bilaterals between themselves, by the same token risking further marginalizing the EU. And they tend to segment even more the Chinese provincial markets, while the WTO approach would reinforce the emerging 'Chinese Single Market'. * Improving the functioning of its domestic markets would make the EU more resistant to the increasing size of the Chinese economy, for instance, in the energy or financial sectors. Such an ambitious program has no chance to succeed if it does not fill two conditions. First, it should keep a clear economic focus. Trade negotiators are not credible when they tackle political issues. Second, the EU should work with other players in the world. As such cooperation should not be perceived by China as an aggressive coalition, it should involve a notable group of countries. It is thus important for the EU to go beyond the US and Japan, and to ensure the participation of medium-size countries in this cooperation. A key benefit of the presence of such medium-size countries is that they are often among the best ones in terms of governance - the great challenge faced by China, and consequently, by the entire world.

International trade, and in particular TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Partnership Agreement between the EU and the US, has recently become a hotly debated policy field in the EU, juxtaposing a coalition of EU institutions and the corporate sector against a large coalition of civil society organizations. TTIP stands out as the prime example of new generation free trade agreements aiming at deep economic integration. Besides tariff elimination, its primary aim is to focus on a very comprehensive set of regulatory issues and rules, with a view to dismantling and harmonizing these in areas such as agriculture, food safety, product and technical standards, sectoral regulations in services, the protection of intellectual property rights, and government procurement. In addition, investment liberalization and protection are central issues, with the proposed investor-to-state-dispute-settlement mechanism (ISDS) being particularly controversial.

The current United States' aggressive and unilateral trade policy, as well as the rapid rise of the Chinese unique economic system – now challenging the constant rules-based trade's institution and global trading system. In the current on-going US-China trade spat, the European Union (EU) has a substantial interest, even if it has been so far reasonably kept from the United States (US) aggressive trade policy and the reaction of China. In such unpredictable circumstances, I begin to argue that the EU should adopt a practically independent trade policy, which can be made rendering to the contemporary setup and going beyond. Finding that how the EU treated both the US and China, I found that the EU was more adjacent to the US than China, but as China became more open to the world and the EU demand upsurge, the EU today shared an equal interest with both China and the US. I then demonstrate that such situation makes it impossible for the EU to build an extensive trade policy. The EU must make a steady trade policy for protecting its economy; in such case, I never mean that the EU has to make an extensive choice or either siding China or the US, or one against the other – EU to protect its economic market can decide and act henceforth. The EU, even more than China and the US, abide and has a strategic interest in preserving global rules-based organization such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). As the US repeatedly challenged the WTO Appellate Body, I then recommend that the EU should take the leadership for making WTO reforms and negotiation together with other aligned states like China and Japan. The EU must reinforce its domestic tools for addressing present and future challenges, mostly in trade and security related areas. In the time being, I suggest that the EU should prepare itself for a more stringent time; the EU should review and rethink some of its trade policy. In such situations, I believe that the EU parliaments can play a vital role to contest with the current challenges and come up with new trade ...

Abstract
The EU is the world's largest trade group, occupying an important position in the world trade in goods and services, especially in the field of service trade. The EU trade in services exports and imports are higher than the United States and Japan, and the EU is the world's largest capital output and input group, and the world's largest foreign aid providers. With the deepening of the European integration process, Europe's position in the world economy and trade is on the rise. Therefore, the EU's trade policy has increasingly become the focus of attention. From the vertical point of view, research directions can be divided into trade in goods policy, trade in services policy, international direct investment policy, trade-related intellectual property policy four field. In this paper, the four vertical areas are illustrated as the focus of the study.

Together with a strong emphasis on deep integration, the main thrust of the EU's new trade strategy as announced in October 2006 is competitive regionalism, i.e. the competition between different jurisdictions which seek strategic advantages for themselves through the conclusion of bilateral agreements with priority trading partners. This article outlines the new trade strategy in the light of the changes caused by the Lisbon Treaty. It then presents a detailed positioning of the EU in the geography of international trade policy.

The European Union (EU) often conditions preferential access to its market upon compliance by its trading partners with Non-Trade Policy Objectives (NTPOs), including human rights and labor and environmental standards. We systematically document the coverage of NTPOs in EU trade agreements and in its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). We then examine the extent to which trade agreements and GSP programs can be used to promote NTPOs. Preferential trade agreements are negotiated under multilateral rules, which require members to eliminate all tariffs reciprocally. As a result, once a trade agreement enters into force, the EU cannot easily restrict or extend access to its market so as to "punish bad behavior" or "reward good behavior" on NTPOs by its trading partners. By contrast, GSP preferences are granted on a unilateral basis, so they can be limited or extended, depending on compliance with NTPOs. EU GSP programs can thus provide a carrot-and-stick mechanism to promote NTPOs in partner countries.