Both Asian countries and American businesses had hoped that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework could be a step on the road to lowering tariffs, trade experts said during a webinar on the future of IPEF, but now they're wondering if there will be any economically significant effect at all from talks about trade facilitation, green transition and supply chain resilience.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
India and the U.S. should aim for "economically meaningful outcomes" from better customs and trade facilitation, supply chain linkages, trade in high-tech products and trade in critical minerals between the two countries, India's commerce minister and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in a joint statement.
China sanctioned American compliance risk advisory firm Kharon, a Kharon researcher and a researcher at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in reaction to recent U.S. sanctions announced on Human Rights Day earlier this month (see 2312080026).
In a report on how Russia is living up to its World Trade Organization commitments -- a report produced every other year for Congress -- the U.S. trade representative wrote that Russia has expanded import substitution to state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, including a ban on imported equipment.
Women who advocate for businesses in the EU and in the U.S. complained that while the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council is better than nothing, it has neglected the "trade" part of its title.
A former State Department official who advised on sanctions and money laundering, who also is a co-founder of Sayari Labs, a financial intelligence and commercial data provider, said that Hudson Institute will produce a paper on creating a broad sanctions program for China, complete with the kind of language that would allow it to be executive-order ready.
The U.S. will grant new Section 232 exclusions for steel and aluminum imports from the EU as part of a deal that will also extend the tariff rate quotas on EU steel and aluminum and avoid EU retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports.
National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America President J.D. Gonzalez said representatives from the rail industry and ports, and Homeland Security officials, including Undersecretary Robert Silvers, had a good discussion on how to optimize supply chain flows, but he hopes the group will meet quarterly and delve "a little bit deeper into some of the processes" needed to make the advisory group effective.
A former EU director general for the bloc's climate action directorate defended its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, saying it's not designed to protect European heavy industry against imports from lower-cost economies.
African and Brazilian participants at the U.N. Climate Change Conference complained that the EU's due diligence requirement to certify that commodities were not grown on deforested land in the tropics (see 2112030047 and 2307270041) is burdensome to small farmers in their countries.