Publication: Trade Liberalization in China's Accession to the World Trade Organization
Loading...
Date
2001-06
ISSN
Published
2001-06
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Before reform, China's trade was dominated by a few foreign trade corporations with monopolies on the trade of specific ranges of products. Planners could control imports through these corporations so there was little need for conventional instruments such as tariffs, quotas, and licenses. Trade reforms increased the range of enterprises eligible to trade in specific commodities and led to the development of indirect new trade instruments, such as duty exemptions. Duty exemptions almost completely liberalized the imports of intermediate inputs used to produce exports and investment goods used in joint ventures with foreign enterprises. Comprehensive liberalization measures in China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession package will help ease this problem as tariff reduction reduces the costs of domestic inputs to exporters. WTO commitments will also lead to the abolition of most nontariff barriers and of quotas on textiles and clothing. With accession, China's share of world exports may almost double between 1995 and 2005 - an estimate that is smaller than those found in studies that do not incorporate duty exemptions. (Duty exemptions were a form of partial liberalization, so any further reduction in protection will boost trade volume less than some estimate.) With reform, labor-intensive industries are expected to grow most, especially exports of apparel. Wages of unskilled worker should rise.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Ianchovichina, Elena; Martin, Will. 2001. Trade Liberalization in China's Accession to the World Trade Organization. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2623. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19606 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Impacts of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004-01)This article presents estimates of the impact of China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). China is estimated to be the biggest beneficiary (US$31 billion a year from trade reforms in preparation for accession and additional gains of $10 billion a year from reforms after accession), followed by its major trading partners that also undertake liberalization, including the economies in North America, Western Europe, and Taiwan (China). Accession will boost manufacturing sectors in China, especially textiles and apparel, which will benefit directly from the removal of export quotas. Developing economies competing with China in third markets may suffer small losses. Accession will have important distributional consequences for China, with the wages of skilled and unskilled nonfarm workers rising in real terms and relative to those of farm workers. Possible policy changes, including reductions in barriers to labor mobility and improvements in rural education, could more than offset these negative impacts and facilitate the development of China's economy.Publication Trade Reform in Vietnam : Opportunities with Emerging Challenges(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-06)In 1986 Vietnam initiated a transition from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy where the government would keep playing a leading role. These renovation (doi moi) policies were successful at generating economic growth and reducing poverty. In the ten-year socioeconomic strategy endorsed by the Ninth Party Congress in April 2001, the authorities further articulated their development objectives in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction. To reach these objectives, the government indicated that its structural reform priorities were to change Vietnam's trade and financial policies, liberalize the climate for private investment, increase the efficiency of public enterprises, and improve governance. The author argues that the pace of implementation of trade reform-which has been impressive so far-is raising new challenges. On one side, fast liberalization of trade reform may soon conflict with the slow pace of implementation of other reforms, including restructuring of state-owned enterprises and state-owned commercial banks. On the other side, Vietnam would greatly benefit from fast implementation of trade reform and particularly fast accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), especially after China's recent WTO accession. Auffret concludes that implementation of trade reform will be a testing ground to reveal the extent of Vietnam's commitment to a market-oriented economy.Publication More Favorable and Differential Treatment of Developing Countries : Toward a New Approach in the World Trade Organization(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors discuss options that could be considered in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to provide more favorable treatment-so-called special and differential treatment (SDT)-to small and low-income countries. They argue that there is a need both for differentiation across WTO members and for steps that would benefit all developing countries. The authors suggest the following to make the Doha Round more supportive of development: 1) A binding commitment by industrial countries to abolish export subsidies and nontariff barriers (tariff quotas) and to reduce most-favored-nation tariffs on labor-intensive products of export interest to developing countries to no more than 5 percent in 2010, and to no more than 10 percent for agricultural products. All tariffs on manufactures should go to zero by 2015, the target date for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Liberalization should also be undertaken by developing countries on the basis of a formula approach. 2) A binding commitment by industrial countries on services to expand temporary access for service providers by a specific amount-for example, equal to an additional 1 percent of the workforce-and not to restrict cross-border trade (for example, by telecom channels). 3) Unilateral action by all industrial countries to extend preferential market access for less developed countries, and to simplify eligibility criteria, especially rules of origin. 4) Affirmation by the WTO that core disciplines relating to the use of trade policy apply equally to all WTO members. 5) Acceptance of the principle that for small and low-income countries "one size does not fit all" when it comes to domestic regulation and to WTO agreements requiring substantial investment of resources. 6) Recognition that some WTO agreements need to be adapted to make them more supportive of development, and a consequent willingness by industrial countries to modify them. 7) Expansion of development assistance to bolster trade capacity in poor countries and strengthening of the links between trade-related technical assistance and the mechanisms through which aid priorities are determined in developing countries. In practice, calls for specific types of SDT often appear to be motivated by a perception that a certain WTO rule is "anti-development" and that therefore developing countries should be exempted from the rule in question. The authors suggest that the appropriate solution to such problems is to change the rules rather than seek an opt-out. What should be up front changes in rules and what should be part of the negotiating agenda is a major issue which needs to be addressed at the Cancun Ministerial meeting. The suggestion that SDT should focus primarily on WTO rules and be limited to those countries that need it most-very small and poor economies-implies that criteria should be adopted to differentiate between countries. Leaving this to self-declaration-the current approach-is not feasible, while reliance on case-by-case, agreement-specific negotiation can generate excessive costs, discretion, and associated uncertainty. While the authors' preference is for a simple rule-of-thumb approach to determine eligibility, this is an issue that requires much more thought and discussion. They suggest that WTO members establish a high-level group to consider criteria that could be used for differentiation purposes and to determine the set of agreements to which differentiation will apply.Publication Export Liberalization, Job Creation and the Skill Premium : Evidence from the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04)This paper explores how the expansion of labor-intensive manufacturing exports resulting from the United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001 translated into wages of skilled and unskilled workers and the skill premium in Vietnam through the channel of labor demand. In order to isolate the impacts of trade shock from the effects of other market-oriented reforms, a strategy of exploiting the regional variation in difference in exposure to trade is employed. Using the data on panel individuals from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004, and addressing the issue of endogeneity, the results confirm the existence of a Stolper-Samuelson type effect. That is, those provinces more exposed to the increase in exports experienced relatively larger wage growth for unskilled workers and a decline of (or a smaller increase in) the relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers. During the period 2000-2004, the skill premium increased for Vietnam's economy as a whole in the sample of panel individuals. Thus, the Stolper-Samuelson type effect appears to have mitigated but did not outweigh the impacts of other factors that contributed to the rise in the skill premium.Publication Economic Impacts of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-05)Ianchovichina and Martin present estimates of the impact of accession by China and Chinese Taipei to the World Trade Organization. China is estimated to be the biggest beneficiary, followed by Chinese Taipei and their major trading partners. Accession will boost the labor-intensive manufacturing sectors in China, especially the textiles and apparel sector that will benefit directly from the removal of quotas on textiles and apparel exports to North America and Western Europe. Consequently, developing economies competing with China in third markets may suffer relatively small losses. China has already benefited from the reforms undertaken between 1995 and 2001 (US$31 billion) and trade reforms after accession will lead to additional gains of around $US10 billion. Accession will have important distributional consequences for China, with wages of skilled workers and unskilled nonfarm workers rising in real terms and relative to farm incomes. Reduction in agricultural protection may hurt some farmers. Possible policy changes considered to offset these impacts include reductions in barriers to labor mobility and improvements in rural education. The authors estimate that the removal of the hukou system would raise farm wages and allow 28 million workers to migrate to nonfarm jobs. If, in addition, there is an increase in education spending that results in a percentage point increase in the annual skilled labor growth rate, approximately 32 million farm workers would leave their job for jobs in the nonfarm sectors. These policies would not only facilitate the evolution of China's economy toward high-technology manufacturing and services, they have the potential to much more than offset any negative impacts of accession on rural wages and rural incomes generally.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.