Legal Issues Of Rules Of Origin Research

With the progress of economic globalization, rules of origin play an ever-increasing important role in the world economic activities, and thus become a significant part of the policy of a country's trade and economy. It has been implemented broadly in MFN,quotas,anti-dumping,safeguards,government procurement,tradeover statistics,GSP and many other preferential trade treaties. Up to this day, there are still no universally acknowledged rules of origin in the world. Each country conducts its own distinctive rules of origins constituted on the base of it own economic interests. These various inconsistent rules of origin have great influences on international trade and multinational investment. This paper gives an outline of the rules of origin from the height of theory and the consideration of pragmatic maneuverability. After the introduction of laws relevant to rules of origin, I suggest some improvement in our country's rules of origin in the reference to our existing rules of origin. This paper is composed of four chapters. In the first chapter, I first give lights to the concept of rules of origin, and introduce various categories of rules of origin. There are different categories of rules of origin in accordance with different ways of classification, such as rules of origin on goods and rules of origin on service, plural rules of origin and single rules of origin,preferential rules of origin and non-preferential rules of origin and so on。Then I discuss how the rules of origin came to being and how it developed all along the way, and finally I analyze the positive and negative sides of rules of origin. The second chapter introduces the criterion of rules of origin, which is the core of it. Presently there are two kinds of criterion, wholly obtained product criterion and substantial transformation criterion. This chapter focuses on the substantial transformation criterion, makes comparisons among change in tariff heading criterion, product specific process criterion, value-added criterion under this standard, andpoints out their respective advantages and disadvantages. The third chapter gives focus to laws relevant to non-preferential rules of origin and preferential rules of origin respectively. In the part of non-preferential rules of origin, I first give some words to the history progress of the international coordination of the non-preferential rules of origin, and then I elaborate on the content of the WTO Agreement on Rules of Origin, the outcome of international coordination. With that done, I can point out some bugs in the existing Agreement on Rules of Origin. Besides, I give a report of the present situation of the coordination, and discuss the application of the non-preferential rules of origin in the area of anti-dumping, safeguard measures, and government procurement. In the part of preferential rules of origin, I introduce rules of origin under GSP, rules of origin under customs union and free trade areas, and then bring forward some suggestions on the unification of preferential rules of origin and non-preferential rules of origin.The forth chapter first gives a brief introduction to our country's regulations on import and export rules of origin, pointing out the major problems in our existing rules of origin. On one side, there are two sets of rules of origin, which are applicable only in limited areas and are not regulated. And both of them are confined in the level of passive administration; on the other side, China hasn't set up rules of origin in respect of products of different shades of sensitivity and products of surplus producing capacity correspondingly, hasn't emended rules of origin along with the progress of science and technology, and hasn't amended rules of origin concerned with some products made in China that have attained improvement in fitting capacity. Facing all these problems, I put forward some suggestions for rectification: First China has to constitute its own rules of origin; secondly, the passive administration mode has to be transformed into ac...