초록/요약

The transnational subsidies have been actively used in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the issue of transnational subsidies has recently come to the fore in the international trading system. Due to its circumventing nature where foreign governments subsidize their own manufacturers in third country markets, transnational subsidies are not included within the purview of subsidies, disciplined under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (“SCM Agreement”) of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”), and thus cannot be directly bound by the rules of the WTO SCM Agreement. The rules of international trade law regulating transnational subsidies are still absent, but in 2021 two regulatory bills on transnational subsidies were proposed by the European Union (“EU”) and the United States (“US”), respectively. Although both of these bills were initially proposed concerning China's transnational subsidies, the regulations, once enacted, can be applicable to not only China but also Korea. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to study the regulatory trends of the transnational subsidies by focusing on those two bills. This paper first introduces the limitations of the current WTO rules to regulate transnational subsidies, emanated from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Next, this paper reviews the recently proposed regulatory bills on transnational subsidies by the EU and the US, respectively. Last but not least, this paper examines the WTO compatibility of the proposed EU and US regulations on transnational subsidies, and analyzes their implications.