FT View: China’s flawed case for market economy status

11 May 2016 / The Financial Times argues that China needs to reform and meet its World Trade Organisation obligations, agreed to in 2001, if it is to enjoy the privileges associated with being granted market economy status (MES). The article states, "Beijing has been much keener to lobby for MES than to reform its own economy to attain it on merit. Most countries, reasonably enough, have concluded that China does not meet the criteria whereby its lending and production decisions are substantially made without state direction. [...] Whatever tactics the EU and US choose, they must try to nudge China further down the path to genuinely liberalising its economy, a journey on which it has made much less progress than it promised when it first joined the WTO." Read the full article here (subscriber only).