Rhee Jinwoo, & Park Eonkyung (2020). The Effect of FTA to Application of Parallelism under WTO Agreement on Safeguards -Focused on US Large Residential Washers Safeguard Measure and Canada Steel Safeguard Measure-. THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, 65(1), 161-204.
-Abstact-
The US-China Trade War is one of the most notable issues that protectionism which gives priority to the protection of domestic industries and reduction of trade deficit has ruled international trade. However, WTO members hesitate to increase tariff rates to restrict imports from other WTO members due to expected strong opposition and countermeasures. Instead, WTO members prefer to exercise trade remedies to take remedial measures against imports which are causing material injury to the domestic industry; Anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, and safeguard measures.
On 7 February 2018, the U.S. government applied safeguard measures on imports of the large residential washer, and on 13 May 2019, the Canadian government applied safeguard measures on imports of certain steel products. Korea is a respondent party in both cases. Especially, both cases examined whether the Safeguards Clauses of FTA could be applied to exclude Korea from safeguard measures.
This paper analyses those two cases to answer the question “how FTA affect to the safeguard investigation and safeguard measures?”. The relationship between WTO Agreement of Safeguards and FTA has been discussed in the view of ‘Parallelism’ since WTO Dispute Settlement Body used the term to prevent WTO members from the application of FTA Safeguard Clauses arbitrary.
This paper figures out the three implications after analyzing the above two cases. First, Safeguard Clauses of FTA play a role to protect the exporting country from the application of safeguard measures. In the two cases, Korea was excluded from both safeguard measures based on Safeguard Clauses of FTA. Second, when the government signs FTA, it has to consider to include Safeguard Clauses. Moreover, since some of Korea’s signed FTAs omit these Safeguard Clauses, the Korean government needs to revise the FTA Safeguard Chapter. For the last, the construction of links through exporters, domestic industries, and consumers enables to relieve the cost and the burden of the exporting country by settling the dispute during consultations before establishing the panel.
https://www.dbpia.co.kr/journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE09328914
Kim & Rhee Law Office