The European Commission will implement the findings of the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body on the EU's safeguard measures on imports of certain steel products, the EC said Aug. 24. The commission said it will bring its safeguard measure into conformity with the WTO Agreement on Safeguards and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994, inviting comments from interested parties by Sept. 14.
The U.K. and Ukraine announced that talks on a new digital trade agreement began during an Aug. 23 meeting between British Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Ukraine's First Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko. The agreement will seek to drop barriers to digital trade in a bid to boost Ukrainian jobs following the invasion of Russia, the Department for International Trade said Aug. 24. The announcement follows the U.K.'s decision to eliminate tariffs on all goods from Ukraine.
Singapore recently completed negotiations with South American trade bloc Mercosur that are expected to lower tariffs on a range of products traded between the two sides, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council reported Aug. 19. The deal includes reduced tariff commitments and initiatives to cooperate on intellectual property rights and competition policy, the report said. HKTDC said Singapore’s trade with Mercosur represents nearly half of its total trade with Latin America.
The U.K. this week launched its new Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS), which it said will “go further” than the EU’s Generalized Scheme of Preferences by cutting tariffs on hundreds of additional products exported from developing countries. DCTS will allow a “wide variety” of goods, including clothes and foods that aren’t widely produced in the U.K., such as olive oil and tomatoes, to benefit from reduced or zero tariffs, the country said. The U.K. said the new scheme will allow British companies to see £750 million per year, or about $900 million, in “reduced import costs.” The DCTS, which also will simplify “complex” trade rules such as rules of origin, covers 65 countries across Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
The U.S. Trade Representative is seeking comments at regulations.gov on what its officials should talk to Kenya about in the areas of:
In filings at the USMCA Secretariat, Mexico and Canada say the Uniform Regulations for USMCA are clear, and say that " roll-up applies to the calculation of [regional value content] RVC for a vehicle. It obliges Parties to take 'no account' of the non-originating materials contained in an originating good when that good is used in the subsequent production of another good."
South Africa requested World Trade Organization dispute consultations with the EU over certain import restrictions imposed by the EU on South African citrus fruit, the WTO said. The EU measures are phytosanitary requirements concerning oranges and other citrus products related to the Thaumatotibia leucotreta pest, known as the false codling moth. In its consultation, South Africa claimed the EU measures are inconsistent with various parts of the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994. South Africa characterized the changes as "abrupt and radical," in that they now require cold treatment processes and precooling steps for specific periods for the citrus before it is imported.
Senior administration officials said that President Joe Biden didn't talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping about whether he wants to make any changes to tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese exports over the course of a two-hour call.
Although President Joe Biden criticized President Donald Trump's China tariffs on the campaign trail, Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Chad Bown said he always thought it was unlikely Biden would roll any of them back, because there are "huge political costs" to doing so, because opponents could label you as "weak on China."
Senate Finance Committee members praised the experience of Doug McKalip, the administration's nominee to be chief agricultural negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. McKalip, a senior adviser on international trade policy and other matters to the agriculture secretary, is a career staffer at USDA.