China, Foreign Investors, and TRIMS: Bulking up, but Not Fully Compliant

China acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, but the past five years or so has witnessed analysts devoting greater attention to probing China’s fulfillment of its WTO obligations given the increasing availability of data and the end of China's phase-in periods for meetings some of its WTO commitments. Researchers, however, have devoted relatively little attention to differences in China’s performance across different WTO agreements and even less attention to variation within particular accords such as the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) or the Trade-Related Investment Measures Agreement (TRIMs). TRIMS is of particular interest to multinational corporations given that it limits or prevents China from imposing local content, technology transfer, and balancing requirements on MNCs in China. This study breaks new ground by looking at variation in China’s compliance performance across three TRIMS issue areas (alternative energy, automobiles, and semiconductors). It demonstrates that a leader cost-benefit model best illuminates variation in China's compliance record across the three issue areas.