Policy & Legal Frameworks for Opening the Chinese Procurement Markets

Abstract

These papers, presented at the West Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2007), discuss the policy and legal frameworks for opening the Chinese procurement markets. The first paper discusses the process for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) and explores some related issues and developments. The author concludes that China's initiation of its GPA accession process may mark a watershed in the evolution of international regulation of public procurement markets. The latter paper focuses upon challenge mechanisms or bid protests in the context of the WTO GPA. While China's membership in the GPA will open the U.S. procurement market to China, Professor Yukins suggests that what will likely remained unresolved is how vendors offering goods from China will enforce the GPA's market-opening provision in the U.S. federal procurement system.

Keywords: public procurement, World Trade Organization, Government Procurement Agreement, accession, China, bid protest, trade, market access

JEL Classification: F13, F14, H57, K33