Agence France Presse | November 8, 2001 | DAVID WILLIAMS
DOHA - After a 15-year struggle to join the World Trade Organization, China's admittance this week is likely to be as welcome for the other 142 members as it is in Beijing.
Uncertainty hangs over the main task of WTO members meeting in the Qatari capital Doha from November 9-13: trying to bridge wide differences and launch an expanded agenda of negotiations to topple trade barriers worldwide.
China offers at least one easy achievement, with its entry to the organization a mere formality since Beijing struck agreements with all the WTO members by offering concessions for its membership.
Television cameras nevertheless will carry the November 10 vote here live into homes across China, press reports say. For other countries, China's entry into the organization also offers the prospect of a boost to the flagging world economy, which has taken a hit from the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
"China in particular is a big enough economy that as it liberalizes it is expected that trade growth will accelerate over the already fairly rapid pace," Brookings Institution analyst Nicholas Lardy told a recent conference in Washington.
"This will be big enough to have an effect on the GDPs (gross domestic products) of lots of countries and even to a limited extent the world," Lardy said.
China, easily the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people, had an economic output of 1.08 trillion dollars, exports of 249.2 billion dollars and imports of 225 billion dollars last year.
Besides the economic impact, China's entry will force tighter trade relations across the Taiwan Strait with archrival Taiwan, which Beijing has considered a rebel province since the end of a bitter civil war in 1949.
"It will certainly also be signifant eventually in terms of bilateral economic relations across the Straits," Lardy said.
"Taiwan will have to get rid of the prohibitions it now imposes on about half of all its tariff lines on importing products from China," he said, describing it as a move likely to accelerate trade between the two sides.
Despite the restrictions, Taiwan businesses have funneled more than 70 billion dollars into the mainland through overseas channels since Taipei allowed civilian exchanges and indirect commerce between the two sides in late 1987.
Opening up to the rest of the world would pose challenges for China, said Robert Subbaraman, an economist with Lehman Brothers in Tokyo, as its pampered industry faces competition with reduced protective tariffs.
The global slowdown is already eating into China's trade surplus, which plunged 29 percent in the first nine months of this year compared to the same period a year earlier.
"It is difficult to push through with reform if growth falls too sharply as reforms entail downsizing of the corporate sector and more layoffs," Subbaraman said.
China has already made big commitments to prise open the door to the WTO before coming to Doha, analysts said.
"The first thing to recognise is that China already agreed to more in so many areas than anybody else that it can come to these negotiations and watch everyone else squirm," Lardy said.
For example, China had agreed to eliminate all agricultural export subsidies when it entered the group, he said. Its domestic subsidies were at 8.5 percent, above the five percent in developed nations but still below the norm for developing countries.
China had supported many traditional views of the G77 group of developing nations, Lardy said, including its fear that labour become a protectionist tool and its scepticism about environmental standards.
"When you get right down to the pragmatics of the issue, though, China has been quite frankly far more foward looking on trade liberalization than many other developing countries."
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