The Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Business Activity : A Survey of Firms in the People's Republic of China

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a major player in the global economy and considers free trade agreements (FTAs) an important part of its global trading strategy. The PRCs export industries are embedded in existing regional and global production networks and are reliant on foreign direct investment flows and external supplies of material and intermediate goods. Immediately after its accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, the PRC adopted a regional approach to trade and began negotiating and implementing FTAs. This paper analyzes the results of a survey undertaken across 232 Chinese firms with regard to FTA-related issues such as utilization, perceived costs and benefits, perceptions of multiple rules of origin, and policy and institutional support mechanisms. It was found that, of the firms surveyed, 45% were using FTAs to some extent. While this utilization rate appears relatively high, and reflects the assertive stance of Chinese firms when it comes to exploring market opportunities, the actual coverage of export value by FTAs is variable. In general, Chinese firms view FTAs as a way to increase their access to partner markets. Nevertheless, there remains an orientation toward the United States and other traditional markets. However, over time, as rebalancing of growth takes place, there may be a shift in market orientation toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and regional markets and the use of FTAs may intensify. This study offers several proposals to increase FTA use, including the expansion of support services for firms, the promotion of larger regional FTAs, and the creation of more opportunities for collaboration between the government and the private sector.China, FTA, utilization rate, growth rebalancing

The Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Business Activity: A Survey of Firms in the People's Republic of China

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a major player in the global economy and considers free trade agreements (FTAs) an important part of its global trading strategy. The PRC’s export industries are embedded in existing regional and global production networks and are reliant on foreign direct investment flows and external supplies of material and intermediate goods. Immediately after its accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, the PRC adopted a regional approach to trade and began negotiating and implementing FTAs. This paper analyzes the results of a survey undertaken across 232 Chinese firms with regard to FTA-related issues such as utilization, perceived costs and benefits, perceptions of multiple rules of origin, and policy and institutional support mechanisms. It was found that, of the firms surveyed, 45% were using FTAs to some extent. While this utilization rate appears relatively high, and reflects the assertive stance of Chinese firms when it comes to exploring market opportunities, the actual coverage of export value by FTAs is variable. In general, Chinese firms view FTAs as a way to increase their access to partner markets. Nevertheless, there remains an orientation toward the United States and other traditional markets. However, over time, as rebalancing of growth takes place, there may be a shift in market orientation toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and regional markets and the use of FTAs may intensify. This study offers several proposals to increase FTA use, including the expansion of support services for firms, the promotion of larger regional FTAs, and the creation of more opportunities for collaboration between the government and the private sector.chinese firm survey; free trade agreement; utilization

CHINA AND EAST ASIAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND COOPERATION

China¡¯s role in the East Asian economic development has grown increasingly important since China becomes a rapidly growing market for other regional economies. China¡¯s participation is essential to the progress of the East Asian economic integration. Due to its great diversity, East Asian trade and investment arrangements have to be gradual and flexible. The foundation of East Asian FTA have been gradually built up beyond ¡°functional integration¡± as observed in intra-regional FDI flow, a new regional network of production and services. A pragmatic approach is to negotiate East Asian FTA on the bases of three FTAs of China-ASEAN, Japan-ASEAN, and Korea-ASEAN, the combination of which are likely to serve the modality of the future East Asian FTA. The three separate agreements need to be integrated into one by harmonizing various degrees of liberalization of agricultural sector, labor mobility, rule of origin and other factors.Economic Integration, China, ASEAN, FTA

China’s Economic Progress and its Role in Strengthening Cooperation between East and South Asia

China has achieved great success in its economic development since it has conducted economy-wide reforms and opened itself to the outside world. Within less than three decades, China has now become a leading economy in the world, the second largest in FDI inflow, the third largest in foreign trade, the fourth largest in GDP, and an important engine for the global economic growth. One of the key factors for Chinas success is its integration into the world economic system, enabling it to utilize the global market resources (market, capital and technology). The WTO accession has made the Chinese economy more open, more transparent and more integrated into the world economic system. Chinas new regional strategy, i.e. forming FTAs with its partners, as well as its foreign investment strategy, have deepened and will continue to further intensify its economic integration and cooperation with its partners. In a regional perspective, the Asia-pacific is the major region from which China receives the most FDI inflows, as well as the principal destination of its exports, with the US and Japan being the two largest markets. East Asia accounts for half of Chinas foreign trade and more than 70% of FDI inflow. Chinas trade with South Asia is still small in volume, but high in growth rate. With the emergence of the Indian economy, trade and services between China and India have increased very rapidly in the recent years. Economic relations between East Asia and South Asia used to be very weak. But this now seems to change with Indian economic dynamism and its active Eastward strategy. Considering its geographical location and its further economic expansion, China can play an important and special role in bridging East and South Asian regions through trade, investment, service, technology, as well as broad economic cooperation activities.China, trade, economic integration, International Agreements, East West Cooperation

China's Economic Emergence and its Impact

The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs; Number 11, 2004, Page 89-103 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5564/mjia.v0i11.10

Internet Of Rights(IOR) In Role Based Block Chain

A large amount of data has been accumulated. with the development of the Internet industry. Many problems have been exposed with data explosion: 1. The contradiction between data privacy and data collaborations; 2. The contradiction between data ownership and the right of data usage; 3. The legality of data collection and data usage; 4. The relationship between the governance of data and the governance of rules; 5. Traceability of evidence chain. In order to face such a complicated situation, many algorithms were proposed and developed. This article tries to build a model from the perspective of blockchain to make some breakthroughs.Internet Of Rights(IOR) model uses multi-chain technology to logically break down the consensus mechanism into layers, including storage consensus, permission consensus, role consensus, transaction consensus etc. thus to build a new infrastructure, which enables data sources with complex organizational structures and interactions to collaborate smoothly on the premise of protecting data privacy. With blockchain's nature of decentralization, openness, autonomy, immutability, and controllable anonymity, Internet Of Rights(IOR) model registers the ownership of data, enables applications to build ecosystem based on responsibilities and rights. It also provides cross-domain processing with privacy protection, as well as the separation of data governance and rule governance. With the processing capabilities of artificial intelligence and big data technology, as well as the ubiquitous data collection capabilities of the Internet of Things, Internet Of Rights(IOR) model may provide a new infrastructure concept for realizing swarm intelligence and building a new paradigm of the Internet, i.e. intelligent governance

Learning to Fuse Multiple Brain Functional Networks for Automated Autism Identification

Functional connectivity network (FCN) has become a popular tool to identify potential biomarkers for brain dysfunction, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Due to its importance, researchers have proposed many methods to estimate FCNs from resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data. However, the existing FCN estimation methods usually only capture a single relationship between brain regions of interest (ROIs), e.g., linear correlation, nonlinear correlation, or higher-order correlation, thus failing to model the complex interaction among ROIs in the brain. Additionally, such traditional methods estimate FCNs in an unsupervised way, and the estimation process is independent of the downstream tasks, which makes it difficult to guarantee the optimal performance for ASD identification. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-FCN fusion framework for rs-fMRI-based ASD classification. Specifically, for each subject, we first estimate multiple FCNs using different methods to encode rich interactions among ROIs from different perspectives. Then, we use the label information (ASD vs. healthy control (HC)) to learn a set of fusion weights for measuring the importance/discrimination of those estimated FCNs. Finally, we apply the adaptively weighted fused FCN on the ABIDE dataset to identify subjects with ASD from HCs. The proposed FCN fusion framework is straightforward to implement and can significantly improve diagnostic accuracy compared to traditional and state-of-the-art methods

A Network-Based Approach to Investigate the Pattern of Syndrome in Depression

In Traditional Chinese Medicine theory, syndrome is essential to diagnose diseases and treat patients, and symptom is the foundation of syndrome differentiation. Thus the combination and interaction between symptoms represent the pattern of syndrome at phenotypic level, which can be modeled and analyzed using complex network. At first, we collected inquiry information of 364 depression patients from 2007 to 2009. Next, we learned classification models for 7 syndromes in depression using naïve Bayes, Bayes network, support vector machine (SVM), and C4.5. Among them, SVM achieves the highest accuracies larger than 0.9 except for Yin deficiency. Besides, Bayes network outperforms naïve Bayes for all 7 syndromes. Then key symptoms for each syndrome were selected using Fisher's score. Based on these key symptoms, symptom networks for 7 syndromes as well as a global network for depression were constructed through weighted mutual information. Finally, we employed permutation test to discover dynamic symptom interactions, in order to investigate the difference between syndromes from the perspective of symptom network. As a result, significant dynamic interactions were quite different for 7 syndromes. Therefore, symptom networks could facilitate our understanding of the pattern of syndrome and further the improvement of syndrome differentiation in depression

European economic integration and East and South-East Asian economy

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020