Cross-Border Regulatory Interferences and Liberalisation of Government Procurement Markets
Research Postgraduate Symposium, 16 November 2015, Faculty of Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
13 Pages Posted: 21 May 2016 Last revised: 22 May 2016
Date Written: November 16, 2015
Abstract
In my doctoral research, I have dealt with interfering with foreign sovereign regulatory matters with government purchases. For example, imagine that one day, some governmental agency in some Western country will refuse to buy Iphones because some reports allege that Apple’s sub-contractors abuse workers in their Chinese plants, and this governmental agency will keep Apple blacklisted until working conditions in those plants are improved. I will deliver more examples throughout this presentation. I have dealt with the problem of meddling with foreign regulatory matters in this way from the perspective of international trade and of opening government contracts to foreign goods, services and contractors. The link between government procurement and international trade is very straightforward in the global village in which we live now. For example, German industry wants to sell high speed trains to state enterprises in China, whereas Chinese giants like Huawei want to sell communications systems in the US, and so forth. However, in practice public procurement markets are still largely closed to free international competition, because governments still protect public procurement markets in more or less covert manner. The purpose of my project has been to look at interferences in foreign regulatory matters as a form of modern protectionism in public procurement markets. In simple terms, I wanted to prove that such interference undermine international liberalization of public procurement markets. And I wanted to propose some solutions to the problem which I had illustrated in the first place.
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