The European Chamber of Commerce in China launched their 2018/2019 Position Paper in Beijing last Tuesday.
Calling on President Xi and the Chinese Government to further market access, licensing and standards reforms, the paper focusses on the notion of ‘Reform Deficit.’
The European Chamber’s position is that China needs to make a more concentrated, efficient and sincere effort to expand the market access reform rhetoric which was set out by President Xi at the 2013 Third Plenum, at Davos in 2017, and at the 19th Party Congress in 2018.
The Chamber believes, that many of the market access reforms which have been introduced at the national level are ‘too little, too late,’ or are undermined by lingering preferential policies towards Chinese companies at the provincial and city level. In addition to this, there is the issue that reforms in certain sectors are being implemented too slowly or are being implemented too quickly, and then adjusted and altered on too frequent a basis for EU companies to be able to adjust.
Across the 22 working groups consulted, there was almost unanimous concern surrounding issues related to: consultation and communication, standards setting, transparency issues, unclear regulations and unpredictable enforcement, and that China did not encourage the presence of SMEs in the market.
The paper concludes that European businesses in China still face significant shortcomings in the reform agenda that still need to be resolved.
Please find the paper here.
