ENFORCEMENT will be the hardest part of making a trade deal between the US and China, says, US-China Business Council (USCBC) vice president Erin Ennis, reported American Shipper
ENFORCEMENT will be the hardest part of making a trade deal between the US and China, says, US-China Business Council (USCBC) vice president Erin Ennis, reported American Shipper. 'China has made clear it will not, nor has it ever agreed to a unilateral US assessment of whether it has implemented commitments it has made. The US is not going to accept China's word on what it has done either,' she said.
The US and China have agreed that any deal reached between the two countries must be enforceable, according to the White House. But as another delegate remarked: 'There is no WTO jail.'
The US is seeking commitments by China to make several economic reforms, including stoppage of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer, mitigation of excess manufacturing capacity and reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers.
'Whatever it takes to have an enforcement mechanism in this is probably going to be one of the more challenging aspects to negotiate,' said Ms Ennis said during the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones (NAFTZ) Legislative Summit in Washington, DC.
Some include investor-state dispute settlement, which is included in several US free trade agreements, some form of state-to-state dispute settlement, as well as tariffs, Ms Ennis said.
She said enforcement need not come in the form of tariffs, 'although I think, given the Trump administration's strong belief that tariffs are a powerful way to get our trading partners to do what we need them to do, and to punish them when they don't, we should assume that the US will be seeking to have tariffs as some part of the mechanism'.
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