Behind the EU-China textiles dispute is a vast, interdependent relationship
China's growing economic strength is "turning up the heat on the EU, and not only in textiles," said Katinka Barysch, chief economist at the London-based Centre for European Reform. But the EU "often finds it difficult to think about China in strategic terms," she added. "Most Europeans are hardly aware of China's growing importance" in world trade, she wrote in a recent study on EU-China relations. "While Americans are fuming about their $160 billion trade deficit with China, most west Europeans worry more about low-cost competition from eastern Europe" -- which is closer but whose population is a small fraction of China's. It's not just Europe that has to worry about China. Stuart Newman, a spokesman for the Brussels-based Foreign Trade Association, an EU umbrella group, said textile exports from other Asian nations to Europe are down this year because China has been undercutting its neighbors. Since 1985, China's foreign trade has jumped by 15 percent a year on average. Last year, EU-China trade exceeded 131 billion euros ($160 billion), and investments by EU companies in China now total almost 30 billion euros ($35 billion). Beyond sending cheap textiles to Europe, China will contribute 230 million euros ($282 million) to participate in Galileo, the EU's planned satellite-navigation system that is a competitor to the U.S.' Global Positioning System. Currently, 100,000 Chinese students are enrolled at European universities, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists are expected to visit EU nations in the years ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment