Free Markets, State Involvement, and the WTO: Chinese State-Owned Enterprises in the Ring

Abstract

Issues surrounding the operation of state-owned enterprises in the international trading system is an understudied area and yet one of increasing importance, particularly given the size and significance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We start by situating the SOEs within the GATT and WTO frameworks and then summarize the main findings of a set papers prepared for an advanced law and policy seminar on SOEs held at Columbia Law School in the fall 2016.

State ownership may not be bad: Based on bibliometric research (2002–2021)

“…Based on the analysis of the literature from China and the USA, with the largest number of articles published in the past 5 years, the differences in the key points between developed countries and developing countries can be seen. The USA has studied the following topics: the WTO's resolution for China's subsidy problem (Mavroidis & Janow, 2017), privatization increasing corruption in the developing world, raising IQ (Innovation Quotient) and growth in China, optimal capital account liberalization in China, the difference in stock liquidity and stock returns between Chinese SOEs and non‐SOEs, the economic performance of SOEs under the Chinese Communist Party's supervision, interest rate liberalization and capital misallocations (Liu, Wang, & Xu, 2021), party‐building or noisy signaling in Chinese corporate governance, and personnel power in governing SOEs. Chinese scholars studied some different content: the wind power investment in China (Zhu et al, 2019), the real effect of China's split share structure reform, dual‐track interest rates, capital misallocation, the Mixed‐Ownership Reform's effect on the innovation strategy choices of Chinese SOEs (Li, Yuan, et al, 2020), the theory of internal governance structure of China's large SOEs (Shen et al, 2020), the status of China's Market Economy and Structural Reforms, the Mixed Reform process, China's rising IQ and growth, the impact of corporate governance ability on capital gains in mixed‐ownership enterprises, imprinting and peer effects in acquiring state ownership‐evidence from private firms in China (Li, Pan, et al, 2020), heterogeneous shareholders' participation, COVID‐19's impact and innovation decisions of Chinese SOEs (Wang, Ma, et al, 2021), SOEs and Chinese real business cycle (Peng et al, 2020), privatization reform alleviating ownership discrimination (Liu, Wang, & Zhu, 2021), the SOER, and productivity growth in China.…”

Systemic Changes in the Politicization of the International Trade Relations and the Decline of the Multilateral Trading System

“…133 While it is questionable whether in so doing, ipso facto, STEs act also in accordance with commercial considerations and afford competitors adequate opportunity to compete for participation-and economic logic would not support this view of the AB 134 -this interpretation is by now water over the dam, as '"there is not one single deviation from this case law". 135 Finally, according to the AB, Article XVII GATT does not apply to an STE's transactions when no foreign enterprises are directly involved. 136 Interestingly, although the scope of those provisions covered only exports and imports and purchase and sales of goods, and the existing rule are generally considered outdated and inadequate to address the issues surrounding commercial and financial operations of state enterprises, 137 GATT Art.…”

Which Combination of Trade Provisions Promotes Trade in Value‐Added? An Application of Machine Learning to Cross‐Country Data

“…Moreover, STEs and labour market regulations gained significance in 1990s, when most of the economies were attracted towards liberalisation and privatisation. These provisions synchronised the cross-country regulations in the treaties of WTO and EU (Mavroidis & Janow, 2017) and paved the way to regulated government interventions and uniform labour rights.…”