Russia's Accession To The Wto Impact On Bilateral Trade Relations Between China And Russia

In the near future, Russia is going to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). After the WTO accession, Russia will follow its commitments and carry out reforms to further lift tariff and non-tariff barriers, open up its market, and cut off price gaps on oil and gas between foreign and domestic markets, all of which will have a significant impact on Sino-Russian bilateral trade. China and Russia have upgraded their cross-border trade, since the collapse of Soviet Union, to a full-fledged one. In 2010, China became Russia's largest trading partner for the first time. In terms of trade in goods, China and Russia are highly complementary, and it saw a continuous high-speed growth in recent years. Meanwhile, trade in services between the two countries have maintained a good momentum. But there are still problems in bilateral trade. The two sides focused on too narrow categories of goods. Their trade in services based on traditional industries, rather than some modern sectors. What's more, mutual investment is limited. Russia's accession to the WTO will expand opportunities for extending Sino-Russian trade. On the other hand, its accession indicates that the two sides must overcome the existing problems on bilateral trade to achieve a win-win situation in the long term.According to Russia's WTO commitments and WTO regulations, the paper summarized analysis done by experts from the World Bank and Russia to observe economic impact that will have on Russia in the aftermath of its WTO accession. In analyzing China and Russia's trading and economic data in the past decade, this paper summarized the status of Sino-Russian trade in both goods and services, their respective characteristics, and the reasons behind. With problems facing Sino-Russian trade, this paper analyzed both positive and negative impacts Russia's WTO accession will exert on the bilateral trade, and proposed appropriate solutions to the Chinese side.