TAIWAN TO RELEASE POSITION PAPER ON TRADE PACT WITH CHINA.

TAIPEI, March 2 Asia Pulse - Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) is scheduled to release a position paper this week on the plan to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China to seek public support for the proposal, ministry sources said Sunday.

According to the sources, the position paper will be presented in a question-and-answer format to expound on the necessity to strike such a deal with China and to clarify certain misunderstandings of the proposed pact's content and effects.

First and foremost, a ministry official said, the position paper will stresses that without such an agreement, the benefits of any tariff exemption or concession pacts that may be signed between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will be offset by requests from other World Trade Organization (WTO) member states for same treatment in accordance with the most-favored-nation principle.

Noting that the proposed cross-strait CEFA is a precursor to the regional trade agreement (RTA) or the free trade agreement (FTA), the official said the WTO has been encouraging its members to develop closer economic relations by signing RTAs FTAs to boost bilateral or multilateral trade.

Against this backdrop, WTO members who have signed RTAs/FTAs are allowed to mutually enjoy preferential trading terms or tariff treatment under those agreements without being subject to the restrictions of the most-favored-nation principle.

Both Taiwan and China are WTO members. The official said if Taiwan signs a CEFA with China, then tariff concessions stipulated in the pact will only be applicable to the two signatories while no other WTO members are eligible to ask for the same treatment based on the most-favored-nation principle.

Meanwhile, the official said the major differences between the CEFA and the RTA/FTA mainly lie in the fact that the RTAs FTAs tend to cover more topics and thus need more time to finalize ...