Our ref : 51/WKC/062
16 August 2002
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Mr Joshua Law
Director General of Trade and Industry
Trade and Industry Department
17/F Trade Department Tower
700 Nathan Road
Kowloon
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Dear Mr Law
Non-agricultural Market Access (NAMA)
Negotiations in the WTO
Thank you for inviting the Chamber to
contribute our comments on the above. I am pleased to submit our views as follows.
Negotiating principle
Since Hong Kong is committed to a tariff-free
regime and imposes no non-tariff barriers (NTB), the business sector would naturally
expect the same from other jurisdictions. The negotiating principle should therefore be to
seek the maximum reduction of tariff and elimination of non-tariff barriers.
We realise that given our free port status,
Hong Kong has little to offer in the exchange of concessions. Nor do we have much clout to
put pressure on other trading partners in the course of the negotiation. As a result,
there may be an inclination on the part of our trading partners to link NAMA with other
subjects such as services when negotiating with Hong Kong. Putting aside the fact that we
do not have much to liberalise in services, we believe the linking of NAMA with
concessions in other negotiations should be resisted. Instead, our position should be that
the great achievements in NAMA in successive rounds previously should enable WTO members
to be much bolder now in the current negotiation. Hong Kong could very well offer itself
as a model of unilateralism, which other trading partners should be encouraged to emulate.
For the current NAMA negotiations, we would
take the position that for economies like Hong Kong, unrestricted market access should be
a matter as of right rather than a benefit to be exchanged for liberalisation commitments
in other areas such as services. We believe this position will be shared by developing
economies which have a great interest in tariff liberalisation of industrial goods.
Tariffs
With regard to tariff, we would like to see a
drastic reduction in tariff rate across the board.
We believe WTO members should also take the
opportunity of the Doha Development Agenda to get rid of ¡§nuisance
tariff¡¨. We recommend that there should be a blanket
agreement, using a negative-list approach, to abolish all tariff beneath a certain
threshold, i.e. the abolition should apply to all products with exceptions listed in a
schedule. We would prefer that threshold to be 5% although we would be prepared to accept
a lower threshold of around 2.5%.
Non-tariff barriers
Much has been achieved in the Uruguay Round
towards liberalisation or tariffication of NTB. We believe the negotiations under the Doha
Development Agenda should progress beyond those of the Uruguay Round so that specific
results could be achieved in related themes such as simplification of administrative and
customs procedures, as well as liberalisation of anti-competitive measures like safeguards
or anti-dumping. We would urge the SAR government to take a stronger stand on these
issues.
I hope you will find the above views useful.
The Chamber will be happy to continue to be involved in formulating the HKSAR¡¦s negotiating positions.
With best regards
Yours sincerely
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Dr Eden Woon
Director |
