"Globalisation, which has offered to our enterprises the access to a market becoming wider and wider and has also offered the possibility of an unprecedented growth, gives birth to new competitors, who, at least at the beginning, take advantage of the low costs. The answer to the resulting problems is not given by the return to the markets fragmentation and to the past Customs wars which would make everybody poorer. These are not the measures that our entrepreneurs are asking for. They rightly demand the severe application of rules decided by the international organizations and the careful action of European authorities, institutional people responsible for foreign trade of all the Union Countries in order to fight properly against commercial assaults which feed on monetary and social dumping or on the unacceptable falsification of products."

President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, 8th October 2003

China brings about a legal competition but strongly asymmetric and therefore unfair as it is based on inner conditions (cost of work, social protection, environmental regulations, political discretion, monetary dumping and so on) which strongly furthers China compared with the other competitors. The situation gets worse if we consider that many Chinese enterprises operate on export markets through incorrect and illegal practice as a continuous forgery of competing countries enterprises's products and especially the Italian products.
Unfortunately in Italy the debate over China's danger has assumed ideological features with a strong opposition between neo protectionists, freetraders, nationalists, globalists, that damages our Country, which should find instead a common strategy with the other European partners and conforming to the WTO rules.
Which urgent and concrete measures can be adopted to defend in the short-medium term the Italian enterprises from the unfair and illegal Asiatic competition?

Conference Programme
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