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GAO's Electronic Database of China's World Trade Organization Commitments

GAO-03-797R Published: Jun 13, 2003. Publicly Released: Jun 13, 2003.
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Highlights

 

China's December 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) signified that the world's seventh largest economy and the United State's fourth largest trading partner would be subject to the multilateral organization's trade liberalizing requirements. China's accession agreement is a set of legal documents totaling more than 800 pages. In order to fulfill its WTO commitments, China will have to undertake numerous actions over the next 10 years, ranging from reducing or eliminating tariffs to improving the transparency of trade-related rules and regulations. GAO released its database of its analysis to assist Congress in analyzing, monitoring, and enforcing China's WTO commitments.

 

Supplemental Material

 

Background

On October 3, 2002, we issued a report entitled World Trade Organization: Analysis of China’s Commitments to Other Members, GAO-03-4. That report analyzed the agreement between China and WTO members, including the United States, that allowed China to accede to the WTO. The agreement sets forth China’s commitments—or legally binding pledges—to other WTO members and describes how China will adhere to the organization’s underlying agreements, principles, rules, and specific procedures. Because of the length and complexity of the accession agreement, we created an electronic database of the major components of the agreement in order to conduct our analysis. We are releasing this database publicly to assist members of Congress and their staffs, U.S. executive branch agencies, and other interested parties in analyzing, monitoring, and enforcing China’s WTO commitments.

Users can search the database to identify China’s WTO commitments and to access some of the key results of our analysis as described in our October 2002 report. In our analysis, we identified nearly 700 individual commitments concerning how China is expected to reform its trade regime, as well as commitments that liberalize market access for more than 7,000 goods and nine broad services sectors. The database allows users to search the more than 800 pages of the agreement based on broad subject areas (such as intellectual property rights or import regulation) or on specific key words, sectors, and products (such as transparency, agriculture, or automobiles). It combines information on commitments China made relating to tariffs and nontariff measures (such as quotas) into one source so that users can quickly identify all the different types of barriers that foreign products face. The database also allows users to search China’s commitments relating to services based on a specific sector, mode of delivery, or the types of limitations that China specified (such as limitations that require foreign service providers to partner with a Chinese company). In summary, the flexibility and comprehensiveness of the database can enable users to quickly and more efficiently analyze China’s commitments.

Contents

Download GAO’s China-WTO Database. This file is a self-extracting zip file that includes the MS Access database, text files of the underlying data tables, China’s original WTO accession agreement, and a summary file (readme.txt) that explains the various files included. Users should download the zip file to their computers’ hard drive and then double-click on the file to extract the individual files to a location on their hard drive.

 

 

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