A Study On The Clause Of Emergency Safeguard Measures Of Trade In Service In Regional Trade Agreement

With the boom of international service trade,developing countries have been forced to establish respective safeguard in General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS)so as to protect their underdeveloped service industry because these countries are facing uncertainty created by liberalization in service trade.In view of significance of service industries for economic development of all country,Article X of GATS allows each Member State establish their own safeguard measures and also including Emergency Safeguard Measures(ESM)of Trade in Service.However,ESM has stalled in multilateral negotiations due to conflict of interest between developed and developing countries.Meanwhile,ESM has obtained progresses in both of bilateral and regional levels,and some regional trade agreements(RTAs)has incorporated ESM.Accordingly,this dissertation can be divided into three chapters and investigates relevant content of ESM clauses.The first chapter begins with introduction of backgrounds of ESM,i.e.firstly introduce change from good trade safeguard measures to service trade ESM,and then investigates fundamental connotations of ESM.Subsequently,this chapter gives a review of controversies on ESM in the multilateral negotiations of World Trade Organization(WTO).Finally,rationalities of ESM are discussed based on characteristics of service,and in both economic and political perspectives.The second chapter focuses on main types of ESM in RTAs,and analyzes attitudes of dissenters of ESM-the United States and Singapore,neutral Japan and supporters-ASEAN and China on bilateral and regional levels of ESM;this chapter also summarizes some characteristics of ESM in RTAs,and explores the reasons accounting for progresses of RTAs made in ESM and positive significance of these progresses further.In the third chapter,it concentrates on investigations of ESM clauses in RTAs signed by China;clauses of ESM collected and arranged from released texts of RTAs are presented in tables.On the basis of all the investigations,shortcomings of this study are analyzed and some advices on improving and solving these problems are also proposed in this dissertation.