27 I have argued that thus far, China has promoted trade liberalization in both the WTO and through its FTAs. However, it should be stressed that many of the FTAs have yet to be completed and thus China’s trade and domestic policies remain very much a work in progress. In this final section, therefore I make four major qualifications to this conclusion. Agreement details. First, the history of free trade agreements is a very mixed one and in thinking about their implications it is important to pay attention both to their content and their prospects for implementation. Countries enter into FTAs with very different motives. Some are genuinely interested in promoting trade liberalization and deep economic integration and view the agreements as a complement to multilateral liberalization. For the most part, for example, the United States is using FTAs as part of such an offensive strategy.33A second group of typically smaller countries is driven by the desire to improve their competitiveness as a location for production. It is often said that preferential trade arrangements are “second best� and that multilateral liberalization is first best. But for individual countries even better than free trade could be the combination of no barriers at home and preferential access to all foreign markets. This competitiveness motive seems to explain why Chile and Singapore have pursued these agreements so avidly. A third group of countries, however, are as yet unwilling to liberalize fully and are basically driven by defensive considerations to undertake these agreements. For these countries, there is often a temptation to conclude agreements that go by the name of FTAs but (a) take a long time to implement; (b) exclude significant amounts of potential trade in goods and services (c) have highly restrictive rules of
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To be sure there is resistance in the US particularly from sugar and clothing producers.