| 英文摘要 |
Subsidies perceived as instruments of governments to spur industrialization and innovation and create economic growth in target sectors were predominantly provided only to the domestic producers, and there is no reason to confer the same benefits to foreign companies in other countries. However, accompanying the development of globalization and the growth of the global value chain, the function of subsidies has broken out of the limitation of supporting domestic industries as usual. Governments may transfer financial support to the subsidiaries and enhance their competitiveness in foreign markets, by providing low-priced products, services, or preferential loans through the state-owned enterprises. Regardless of the forms, subsidies provided by foreign governments may confer benefits to their overseas subsidiaries and use the low-cost advantages to exclude competitors in the markets of the host countries, which will impair the environment of competition in the countries’markets. Through these unfair commercial activities, subsidized enterprises also can strategically acquire important foreign enterprises and assets at higher prices in foreign markets, or participate in government procurement involving important infrastructures at an abnormally lower price. Although there are generally competition regulations, anti-subsidy laws, government procurement laws, and foreign investment review mechanisms at the domestic level, the problems caused by foreign subsidies still can’t be adequately addressed. On 28 November 2022, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament adopted the Regulation on foreign subsidies distorting the internal market (FSR). To deal with the distortive effects caused by foreign subsidies in the Single Market, the FSR delivers the concepts of foreign subsidies, and market distortions, and establishes a general procedure of an investigation initiated by the Commission ex officio to find out the subsides at first. Secondly, it categorizes the other two models of foreign subsidies according to the different commercial activities, including the acquisition and government procurement, and provides the special review procedures separately. For the investigations, the FSR imposes the obligations of pre-notification on the participants in the cases of merger or government procurement and requires them to provide information about the amount of the subsidies they received from the third countries. The FSR also authorizes the Commission to initiate preliminary and in-depth investigations, find out the existence of the distortive foreign subsidies, and make decisions about the calibrated redressive measures to alleviate the negative effects caused by the foreign subsidies. This article attempts to analyze the initiation, the contents, the arguments, and the related issues raised by the FSR, including the consistency with the WTO Agreement. |
