Chinanews, Shanghai, Dec. 28 – Approved by the State Council, China will start to implement a new tariff duty scheme from January 1, 2007. In general, the tariff duty will be reduced from 9.9% to 9.8%, with the average rate of tariff duty for agricultural products being adjusted to 15.2% and that for industrial products being adjusted to 8.95%. Experts say that the slight adjustment of tariff duty will “affect” on import and export trade very little, the Shanghai Securities Journal reported.
In recent years, China has consistently reduced its tariff duty in order to fulfill its commitment to WTO. As the tariff duty for most commodities has already been reduced, there only remain a small number of products for which the tariff duty can be adjusted in 2007, most of them being agricultural products. Since these commodities are rather limited in number, and the tariff duty rate will be reduced by only one percentage point, the adjustment will not affect Chinese trade much, said Wu Jiahuang, deputy president of the China WTO Research Association.
“After China applies tariff reduction to these goods in 2007, it is expected that China will adjust the tariff duty for several other goods in 2008. Most of them should be chemical products and their number will also be very small,” he said.
It should be noted that in addition to fulfilling its WTO commitment, China will apply temporary tariff duty on some 300 imported commodities next year, in order to make use of the tariff duty in its role of controlling the macro economy. Most of the goods that adopt the temporary duty are energy products like coal and stone materials. Wu explained that China has been implementing this temporary duty system every year ever since it carried out the open policy, especially since China joined the WTO. The measure can reduce the actual customs duty amount for domestic companies and therefore bring economic benefits to them. On the other hand, by imposing a higher tariff duty rate on high energy-consuming products, China can constrain the export volume of these products so as to save more energy resources and protect the environment, and to restructure the economy and transform the growth mode of trade.
