The Political Economy of the Chinese Market Economy Status given by Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

When China signed a Protocol of Accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, other country members were allowed to consider China as a Non-Market Economy until the end of 2016. Taking into account this restraint, the aim of this paper is to answer the following question: can the Market Economy Status Recognition (MES) be measured by a de-facto compliance? The variable used to measure the compliance is the number of antidumping investigations initiated by each country. Hence, the countries which recognize China as a market economy would have a fewer antidumping investigations than the countries that are still treating Beijing as a Non Market Economy, which is the key reason of why the Chinese Government has been campaigning vigorously since 2001 to gain a MES status by a larger number of its economic partners.