| Statement by H.E. Mr. SUN Zhenyu At the Fourth Trade Policy Review of Chile |
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| Thursday,October 15,2009 Posted: 18:18 BJT(18 GMT) |
| From:wto Article type:Original |
7 October 2009
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I’d like to start by expressing my warm welcome to the delegation of Chile headed by Ms. Ana Novik, and thank her for her excellent presentation. My congratulations on Chile’s miracle on its successful handling of this economic crisis and on setting examples for trade liberalization. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the Secretariat and the Government of Chile for preparing the comprehensive reports for this meeting. Our appreciation also goes to the discussant, H.E. Mr. Eckart Guth, for his insightful remarks, which will be of great value for our discussion.
Mr. Chairman, this trade policy review is held at an extremely important moment. The G20 leaders have reiterated the call on concluding by 2010 the long stalled Doha Development Round, which is already the longest set of multilateral trade negotiations in the GATT and WTO history.
Chile has consistently played an important role through submission of many proposals to the various WTO bodies during the review period. Ambassador Mario Matus and his team in Geneva have worked very hard in the whole process. Mr. Matus’s contributions as Chair of General Council is widely appreciated.
Mr. Chairman, We share the Secretariat’s conclusion on Chile’s trade policy for the period between 2003 and 2009, which indicates that a trade regime with characteristics of openness, transparency, predictability and inter-sectoral-neutrality has been continuing since 2003. Although Chile has been affected by the critical global financial crisis since the last quarter of 2008, we have witnessed that Chile has maintained and even improved a sound trade environment by adopting many trade facilitation measures like computerization of its import and export procedure, creation of customs tribunals, abolishing customs clearance tax and airport tax, export promotion programmes and revising its competition regime by establishing a tribunal in 2004. Chile enjoyed a steady increase of share of trade in goods in its GDP from 44% in 2004 to 69.6% in 2008. Its trade regime that combines unilateral market opening, multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations gives Chile an outward orientation character for its economy.
Mr. Chairman, though we are geographically far from each other, China and Chile are close trading partners. China is Chile’s largest trading partner with steady and healthy trade relations with Chile. In 2008, the bilateral trade volume reached 17.5 billions US dollars, which represented an increase of 19.3% over 2007. Through the bilateral free trade agreement which took effect in 2006, both countries have benefited from preferential tariffs on their imports and exports. The economic cooperation between the two countries has deepened. Although due to the world economic slowdown, there was a decrease in our bilateral trade this year, we are determined to enhance our bilateral economic and trade relationship against the economic turbulences.
Mr. Chairman, for the purpose of better understanding the Chile’s efforts to maintain its sound trading regime and useful trade facilitation measures to promote its trade, China has submitted questions with respect to Chile’s specific trade policies and measures in place. We appreciate Chile’s prompt responses to our questions and look forward to further discussions.
Finally, I wish this trade policy review of Chile a great success.
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