What is a Free Trade Agreement? Free Trade Agreement Review

About Free Trade Agreements

A free trade area (FTA) usually refers to two or more countries or regions that, through the signing of a free trade agreement, mutually cancel tariffs and non-tariff barriers on most goods, cancel market access restrictions on most service sectors, and open up investment, thereby promoting the free flow of goods, services, capital, technology, personnel and other production factors, achieving complementary advantages and promoting common development. Sometimes, it is also used to describe one or more regions within a country that have eliminated tariffs and trade quotas and have less administrative intervention in the economy.

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is an agreement reached between independent tariff entities on a voluntary basis on trade liberalization and related issues.

Government support

1. The development trend of free trade zones in line with international trade

Regional economic integration has become the mainstream trade trend of this century.

2. Share the policy dividends of the national free trade zone strategy

Against the backdrop of the rapid development of free trade zones internationally, the “implementation of the free trade zone strategy” was written into the report of the 17th CPC National Congress in 2007, formally elevating the free trade zone strategy to a national strategy.

Advantages

1. Preferential tariff information

One of the core preferential policies of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is that goods from FTA partner countries can enjoy import tax and tariff reductions. By enjoying preferential tariff treatment, the trade costs of enterprises are greatly reduced.

2. Rules of origin information

Products that comply with specific rules of origin and obtain certification of origin can enjoy preferential policy treatment under the free trade agreement.

System Features

Based on the information of national free trade agreements (FTAs), we have developed an FTA query system with the following functions:

Whether specific goods have preferential tariff treatment in free trade zones;

Comparison of preferential tariff rates for specific commodities with most-favored-nation rates and ordinary rates;

Automatically calculate the amount of tariffs that companies can save by using preferential tariffs in free trade zones;

Rules of origin that specific products must meet to take advantage of preferential tariffs in free trade zones;

Things that enterprises should pay attention to during customs clearance;

The procedures and documents that enterprises need to prepare in order to enjoy preferential tariffs in import and export business;

Information on laws, regulations, departmental rules, administrative decisions, announcements, etc. regarding free trade zones and rules of origin;

Publication of actual cases where companies or products have benefited from rules of origin;

Trade information, tariff information and policy releases of member countries in the free trade area.

Scope of application

From scratch, from near to far, we have initially built a peripheral free trade platform that echoes the east and the west and a global free trade network distributed across the five continents. As of June 2015, 15 free trade agreements have been successfully signed.