China and the United States live today in a state of economic competition. Since the Obama administration, the United States has identified in the Indo-Pacific region an area of strategic interest for America’s security and defense. Thus, Washington has felt the need to write the commercial rules in the region before someone else could. The region, however, is writing its own trade rules, through the signing and the ratification of the CPTPP and the RCEP. China is
participating so far only in the latter but has begun the application process for the former as well. To better understand the effect of the RCEP on the countries involved, the article aims at showing how FTAs can be used as a protectionist measure or, on the contrary, lead to a delocalization of the production because of the restrictiveness of the Rules of Origin, which refer to the standards and procedures that determine the source country of a product.
China-US Decoupling and the Issue on the Rules of Origin
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