WTO'ing a Resolution to the China Subsidy Problem

Chad Bown and Jennifer Hillman

No 14076, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The United States, European Union, and Japan have begun a trilateral process to confront the Chinese economic model, including its use of industrial subsidies and deployment of state-owned enterprises. This paper seeks to identify the main areas of tension and to assess the legal-economic challenges to constructing new rules to address the underlying conflict. It begins by providing a brief history of subsidy disciplines in the GATT and WTO predating any concerns introduced by China. It then describes contemporary economic problems with China’s approach to subsidies, their impact, and the apparent ineffectiveness of the WTO’s ASCM to address them. Finally, it calls for increased efforts to measure and pinpoint the source of the problems—in a manner analogous to how the OECD took on agricultural subsidies in the 1980s—before providing a legal-economic assessment of proposals for reforms to notifications, evidence, remedies, enforcement, and the definition of a subsidy.

Keywords: Wto; Subsidy; State-owned enterprise; Dispute settlement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14076 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: WTO'ing a Resolution to the China Subsidy Problem (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14076

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14076

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().