China’s Mushrooming Free Trade Agreements: New Zealand and China’s Upgraded Free Trade Agreement

FTAs have mushroomed and proliferated at very fast pace in East Asia, especially after the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997. The East Asian economies were very disappointed with the International Monetary Fund’s handling of the crisis. In particular, it provided some countries, like Thailand and Indonesia, with poor advice. After the AFC, countries like China, Japan, and South Korea signed FTAs with different countries around the world. The first East Asian FTA talks took place between Japan and South Korea in 1998. Like its neighbors, China also pursued FTAs with neighboring countries. The FTA between China and New Zealand was signed on the 7th of April 2008 and was implemented on the 1st of October 2008. As a result of this FTA, China has become New Zealand’s largest trading partner; New Zealand’s exports to China have quadrupled. As of June 2020, the trade between China and New Zealand exceeded NZ$32 Billion. China and New Zealand signed an upgraded FTA on the 26th of January 2021. The upgraded FTA includes rules relating to e-commerce, competition policy, government procurement, and environment and trade issues. The bilateral trade between China and New Zealand is complimentary rather than competitive; while China mainly exports manufactured products to New Zealand, New Zealand primarily exports agricultural products.

The Application of PRIMET For Pesticide Registration and Monitoring in Ethiopia

Pesticide registration is an activity often not supported with proper risk assessment procedures in developing countries like Ethiopia. In this study, we tried the PRIMET (Pesticide Risks in the Tropics for Man, Environment and Trade), a tool developed to assess the risks to non-target protection goals believed to assist the pesticide registration and monitoring activities in Ethiopia. For this study, seven pesticides (imdacloprid, difenoconazole, metalaxyl, dimethoate, thiamethoxam, nicosulfuron and bupirimate) were selected randomly and their data of physico-chemical characteristics, toxicological information and pesticide use were mined from either the information given on the dossier or PPDB (Pesticides Properties Database). Results indicated that imidacloprid, dimethoate and thiamethoxam are highly risky to bees when bee hives are present inside the field of the sprayed crop, while Thiamethoxam is highly risky at when hives are present in and off field crop situation. Another outcome was that imidacloprid and dimethoate are expected to have high acute risk for birds, while difenoconazole, metalaxyl, dimethoate showed high acute and chronic risks to the aquatic ecosystem, respectively. Future studies should give emphasis on how the results of risk assessment can be practical to help the registration processes and how the results are compared with actual measurement values.

Does Environmental Regulation Affect Export Quality? Theory and Evidence from China

Most studies focus on the empirical investigation of the relationship between environment and trade, but they lack a systematic theoretical framework. To fill this gap, this study constructs an analytical framework of export competitiveness from the perspective of product quality, and reveals the theoretical mechanism of environmental regulation affecting export quality. We empirically examine the impact of environmental regulation on the export quality of China’s manufacturing industry, as well as its possible mechanism. Our findings show that environmental regulation can significantly promote the export quality upgrading of the manufacturing industry and that process and product productivity are two possible channels through which such regulation affects export quality, although their mediating effects are in opposite directions. The mediating effect of product productivity is greater than that of process productivity, indicating that environmental regulation mainly has an innovation offset effect on China’s manufacturing industry. For pollution-intensive industries, environmental regulation plays a significant promoting role through the channel of product productivity, but, for clean industries, environmental regulation has an inhibitory effect through the channel of process productivity. These findings provide important enlightenment for the coordinated development of China’s ecological civilization and trade power.

Environment and Trade

This chapter presents the literature on Eurasian trade, the geography of trade environment, and the organizational challenges faced by long-distance trade. The expansion of trade from local to long-distance to Eurasian trade was a major challenge to merchants everywhere. Operators had to overcome tough and, at times, even hostile environments on the oceans, straits, deserts, and steppes. They had to match the supply of goods in one location to the demand in a faraway, climatically and culturally different location. The chapter shows how institutions were crucial in overcoming the challenges. It establishes the existence of a wide historiographical space that justifies the focus on the early history of late-coming trade companies, and on their organizational challenges and solutions.

Tinkering with Failure (1991–2001)

This chapter provides a straightforward account of Japan's meek surrender to a decade of tentative, groping, half-measure post-Cold War intelligence reform. Like intelligence communities elsewhere, the Japanese intelligence community did not anticipate the end of the Cold War. The “East” and “West” were realigning and even finding common ground—and triumphalism reigned in the “free world.” Since the United States was now by default or by design the world's overwhelming military power, some Japanese policy makers felt less urgency to develop a new, comprehensive intelligence formula to cope with this new world order. The shift in the strategic environment and trade frictions with the United States gave greater purpose to the Japanese's determination to do more and better on their own, and several highly conspicuous intelligence failures would provide the necessary political impetus for change. Experimentation was possible and it was time for tinkering.

The Impact of the Development of Trade Practices on Enforcement of International Environmental Law

The issue of trade and environment is always debatable. Degradation and damaging to the environment surge the countries in making comprehensive and multi-approach planning. This is based on the view that trade should not only count for profit but also carry out calculations and planning for the impacts and conditions when the business is carried out and after completion. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether the environment causes trade not to be carried out and to end economic growth and there is a solution to balance the environment and trade as prevention in both fields through environmental protection legal instruments. The first issue showed that trade that used to be a source of income that is the main target of countries, nevertheless, the unwise planning and also corrupt cases has made the trade become the trigger for environmental damage. This condition caused by a lack of awareness in law enforcement and even various corruption issues causing trade to become a threat, especially for the environment. The second issue arises, which is the mechanism in balancing trade and the environment to preserve the environment and encourage the country's economic growth by optimizing the implementation of environmental protection laws. This paper uses normative legal research methods by collecting data derived from the literature, legislation, articles, and cases that occur within countries. The result shows that more states and stakeholder using more technique on achieving a balance of trade and environment protection, with a pro-environment calculation, it is expected that trade will be carried out in parallel with environmental preservation.

WTO Case Law 2016

The WTO adjudicating bodies faced some very tough questions in 2016: the status of non-market economies, the consistency of policies aiming to address tax evasion with the WTO, and the clash between environment and trade policies were all on the menu. Old issues, like the consistency of zeroing, resurfaced as well, albeit with a twist this time, since the Appellate Body (AB) had to address the question whether zeroing is consistent with the WTO when practiced in the realm of a methodology that was so far untested.

Plasticity for desiccation tolerance across Drosophila species is affected by phylogeny and climate in complex ways

Comparative analyses of ectotherm susceptibility to climate change often focus on thermal extremes, yet responses to aridity may be equally important. Here we focus on plasticity in desiccation resistance, a key trait shaping distributions of Drosophila species and other small ectotherms. We examined the extent to which 32 Drosophila species, varying in their distribution, could increase their desiccation resistance via phenotypic plasticity involving hardening, linking these responses to environment, phylogeny and basal resistance. We found no evidence to support the seasonality hypothesis; species with higher hardening plasticity did not occupy environments with higher and more seasonal precipitation. As basal resistance increased, the capacity of species to respond via phenotypic plasticity decreased, suggesting plastic responses involving hardening may be constrained by basal resistance. Trade-offs between basal desiccation resistance and plasticity were not universal across the phylogeny and tended to occur within specific clades. Phylogeny, environment and trade-offs all helped to explain variation in plasticity for desiccation resistance but in complex ways. These findings suggest some species have the ability to counter dry periods through plastic responses, whereas others do not; and this ability will depend to some extent on a species' placement within a phylogeny, along with its basal level of resistance.