Implications of China's accession to the World Trade Organisation for China and the WTO

The problem set in this paper is, on one level, an impossible challenge. It is clear that the long-run implications of a major change such as China's accession to WTO cannot be accurately foretold. As with other such important events, it will not even be possible to fully assess them even after the event. When asked nearly two hundred years later about the long run consequences of the French Revolution, Chairman Mao is said to have observed that it was 'too early to tell'. This will surely be true for a very long time in the case of China's accession to the WTO, where the counterfactual is unclear, and the outcome depends on a complex interaction between policymakers both in China and abroad. However, even if we cannot analyse, we can certainly organise, and a major purpose of this paper is to provide a list of some of the ways in which China's accession will matter. Such a scheme of organisation will, we hope, provide a useful basis for understanding some of the impacts, and for future analysis. In the next section of the paper, we provide a framework for assessing the implications, and lay out some of the channels through which China's accession to the WTO seems likely to impact on China and the WTO. Then, in subsequent sections, we examine the evidence on those channels of effect.