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The European Union (EU) is mulling over the abolition of its "non-market economy" list, which lists China among 14 other countries.

The bloc also announced that a new "country-neutral" method will be used to reform current anti-dumping and anti-subsidy legislation.

EU's Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom comments.

"Now we will abolish that list and do a new country neutral (approach). This could go for any country. What we are looking at, is whether there are distortions in a country or even in a sector and, we will look at that in a non-discriminatory way when it comes to each country. So this is the new proposal."

This proposal would create an additional non-standard methodology, which means the EU Commission would have to prove "market distortion" in its future investigations on a case-by-case basis.

The EU has two bases for calculating in anti-dumping cases, one for so-called market economies and the other for "non-market economies".

The dumping margins for both kinds of countries are measured in different ways.

China has not been granted a "market economy" status.

Currently in evaluating Chinese imports against EU dumping standards the EU compares prices with those of a third surrogate country, instead of China's domestic prices.

This method, in accordance with WTO rules, will expire on Dec. 11th of this year.