US Trade Rep warns on China 'market economy status'

Donald Trump’s trade tsar has fired a warning shot at both Beijing and the World Trade Organization, cautioning that any decision to label China a “market economy” would have “cataclysmic” consequences for the body. Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Robert Lighthizer said the US was eager to see changes in the WTO’s dispute resolution system, arguing that the country had unfairly ended up as the top target for complaints in the global trade court. But the US trade representative singled out a dispute brought last December by China against the EU and US over whether it should be deemed a market economy as the “most serious litigation that we have at the WTO right now,” the Financial Times reports. “I have made it very clear that a bad decision with respect to the non-market economy status of China… would be cataclysmic for the WTO,” he said.