The European Union’s trade chief said on Saturday that a deal had been reached with China to settle a dispute over exports of low-cost solar panels that had threatened to set off a wider trade war between two of the world’s largest economies.

 

The settlement essentially involves setting a fairly high minimum price for sales of Chinese-made solar panels in the European Union to try to prevent them from undercutting European producers. Those producers accused Chinese manufacturers of benefiting from enormous loans from state-owned banks and other government assistance that enabled them to charge prices that would otherwise be uneconomical.

 

The deal immediately met with ferocious criticism from the European manufacturers that had filed the complaint, and it complicates a similar dispute between the United States and China.

 

The European settlement with Beijing in some ways complicates a similar dispute between the United States and China. The United States began trying in early summer to arrange a comprehensive deal among Beijing, Brussels and Washington that would set new global trade arrangements for solar panels in exchange for the removal of the American tariffs and the preliminary European tariffs. Faced with a complex process in the United States for removing tariffs once the Commerce Department has made them final, the European Union pushed ahead with its own negotiations with China.

 

Solar panels represent more than 6 percent of China’s exports to the Continent, making them one of the largest Chinese exports to the European Union.