Reconstruction and Development, the New Development Bank and the World Bank have not yet improved the business environment for European enterprises and workers; regrets the absence of professional sustainable impact assessments in various projects relating to Belt and Road, and underlines the importance of investment quality, particularly with regard to positive effects on employment, labour rights, environmentally sound production, and the mitigation of climate change, in line with multilateral governance and international standards; 28. Supports the ongoing negotiations on a comprehensive EU-PRC Investment Agreement, which were launched in 2013, and invites the PRC to engage more in this process; calls on both parties to renew their efforts to advance the negotiations, which are aimed at achieving a genuine level playing field for European businesses and workers, and to ensure reciprocity in market access, striving for specific provisions on SMEs and public procurement; calls on both parties, moreover, to seize the opportunity provided by the investment agreement to increase their cooperation in the area of environmental and labour rights, and to include a sustainable development chapter in the text; 29. Recalls that EU companies face a growing number of restrictive market access measures in the PRC owing to joint venture obligations in several sectors of industry and further discriminatory technical requirements, including forced data localisation and source code disclosure, and regulatory rules for foreign-owned business; welcomes, in this regard, the Notice on Several Measures on Promoting Further Openness and Active Utilisation of Foreign Investment, issued by the PRC’s State Council in 2017, but regrets the absence of a timeline for achieving its goals; calls on the Chinese authorities, therefore, to swiftly materialise these commitments; 30. Calls for both the EU and its Member States and China to intensify cooperation to build up circular economies, as this urgent need has become even more visible following China’s legitimate decision to ban imports of plastic waste from Europe; calls on both partners to intensify economic and technological cooperation in order to prevent global production chains, trade and transport, and tourism services from causing an unacceptable build-up of plastic pollution in our oceans; 31. Calls on the PRC to strive to play a responsible role on the global stage, with complete cognisance of the responsibilities arising from its economic presence and performance in third countries and on global markets, including by lending its active support to the multilateral rules-based trading system and the WTO; believes, in the present context of global value chains, that heightening international trade tensions should be resolved through negotiations, while reiterating the need to pursue multilateral solutions; calls, in this respect, for the fulfilment of obligations enshrined in the PRC’s Accession Protocol to the WTO and the protection of its operative mechanisms; underlines the notification and transparency obligations stemming from WTO agreements as regards subsidies, and expresses concerns about the current practice of the direct or indirect subsidisation of Chinese companies; calls for coordination with major EU trading partners on joint efforts and action to tackle and eliminate state-induced market distortions affecting global trade; 32. Regrets the fact that the PRC, despite the completion of the procedure for reforming the European anti-dumping duties calculation methodology, has not yet withdrawn its case against the EU at the WTO appellate body;