What is the Road Ahead for the New China-Korea FTA?

Korea Chair Snapshot

What is the Road Ahead for the New China-Korea FTA?

- Despite the agreement announcement on the sidelines of APEC, 22 chapters still require technical negotiations, with a formal agreement slated for mid-2015, at the earliest.

- The agreement is not as high-quality in scope as the KORUS FTA, covering only 70 percent of agricultural products and excluding sensitive products such as rice, steel, and automobiles.

- The forecast, nevertheless, is that once implemented it will immediately cut $8.7 billion in tariffs on Korea’s imports to China, the ROK’s largest trading partner.

- The FTA announcement will increase speculation about Korea's strategic "tilt" towards China, but Seoul is likely to use the FTA as a platform for pushing its own future entry into the U.S.-led Transpacific Partnership (TPP) regional trade agreement and, further down the road, perhaps act as a bridge to facilitate China's entry to TPP.


Korea Chair Snapshot is published by the Office of the Korea Chair (http://www.csis.org/ program/korea-chair) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).