These days, Free Trade Agreement is supplementing multilateral trade negotiation of WTO and globally spreading as a new trading trend. To cope with such trend and reinforce the status of our nation' s trade power, Korea also prosecuted multiple FTA negotiations since 21st century and rose as a country which has 8 FTA agreements and is running 45 FTAs as of May, 2012.
To apply FTA preferential tariff in commodities trade, there are essential requirements for each FTA agreement on judgment of country of origin. The core of FTA Rules of Origins shall be found at Certificate of Origin which is judged by origins and applied FTA preferential tariff - with Certificate of Origin, the importers will be privileged preferential tariff when trade with FTA partners.
In application of preferential tariff, there is a posteriori tests system to prevent the traders from getting preferential tariff with false certificate or certificate issued in error or if they do not provide primafacie evidence of the reason in fact relevance for issued certificates. From this posteriori tests, the traders will be charged existing preferential tariff and even got a fine if it turns out false certificate or issued in error so, not only exporters but also importers should have adequate appreciation and understanding on Certificate of Origin.
Since each FTA partners of Korea has their own standards though they are same commodities and each FTA agreement has various standards by item, there are lots of difficulties for the traders in judgment and application of Certificate of Origin.
So, from this study, I analyzed certificates regulations for trading commodities of 7 FTA agreements, except the Korea-Peru FTA, and studied the difficulties in applications of FTA and with those investigations, sought maximization measures for our nation' s trading corporations to utilize FTA agreement in the field.
It was tried to interpret agreements and solve problems in application of FTA at working-level and intended to suggest solutions in application of FTA by analyzing problems that our nation' s small and medium exporters and manufactures are undergoing.