EEU economies not ready for preferential trade relations with China - EEU Trade Minister
MOSCOW. March 23 (Interfax) - The economies of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) member countries are not ready yet for preferential trade relations with China but are instead discussing all-around, non-preferential cooperation, EEU Trade Minister Veronika Nikishina said in Moscow on Wednesday at a conference on new conditions and opportunities for trade cooperation in the ATP and Eurasian space.
"Last year our countries' leaders approved the start to talks with China on a non-preferential agreement on trade and economic cooperation. We are now finalizing the corresponding directives and we would like to propose to our leaders work within this agreement along two scenarios," she said.
"Because the economies are not in fact ready for preferential relations with China, we will set elements of all-around, non-preferential cooperation in the context not just of regulation, but the EEU's sectoral and operational cooperation with China. This is new. Previously we had bilateral relations with China. There were no union relations, that promoted union projects of joint interest with China and lined up certain quality standards," she said.
"Simultaneously, we would propose analyzing those innovations that emerge for business of countries participating in interregional agreements [such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership] from formation of new standards, not in the area of movement of goods, but in other groundbreaking areas in these agreements. There needs to be a study of which of them we could add to our relations with China and establish, perhaps not concrete understandings but topics, what we would need in order to arrive at preferential relations with China or other countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or ASEAN space, where we will extract advantages from such sectoral cooperation," she said.
"I have in mind that we must talk not simply about trade in the form of movement of goods, but the coordinated interactions and services that accompany this trade, which we have never had on the agenda of agreements on free trade, quality standards, labor standards, environmental standards, that we will use to dampen the potential negative consequences of the preferences," she said.
