Policy Statement & Submission

Our ref : 51/WKC/062
16 August 2002

　

Mr Joshua Law
Director General of Trade and Industry
Trade and Industry Department
17/F Trade Department Tower
700 Nathan Road
Kowloon

　

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

　

　

Dr Eden Woon
Director