U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that talking about tariffs more than other aspects of trade policy is, to a large degree, "a red herring," and said reducing U.S. trade policy "down to a conversation about tariffs is really unfair."
US Trade Representative (USTR)
A U.S. Cabinet level position which serves as the President's primary representative, negotiator, and spokesperson regarding U.S. trade policy. The USTR heads the Office of the United States Trade Representative which develops and coordinates U.S. policy for international trade, commodities, and direct investments, as well as overseeing trade negotiations with other countries.
Automakers and their suppliers are telling the Biden administration in comments submitted ahead of an upcoming report that not having a form for certificate of origin has paradoxically made compliance more difficult. They also said that companies are having a difficult time certifying how much workers in the supply chain earn, and that the absence of final USMCA regulations are all problems for trade compliance in the more than three years since USMCA took effect.
Japan, which suffered economic coercion from China earlier than any other country, is largely on the same page as the U.S. when it comes to supply chain resilience and restrictions on exports, but the two diverge in their attitudes about China's role in the global economy.
A USMCA dispute settlement panel ruled in Canada’s favor in a much-awaited second decision on Canada’s dairy tariff rate quotas, according to a report released by the panel on Nov. 24.
The Senate Finance Committee's top Republican, along with seven of his colleagues, accused Office of the U.S. Trade Representative officials of misleading congressional staff on what they would be negotiating on digital trade at the World Trade Organization. "As recently as this weekend, USTR officials told congressional staff that they had not abandoned support for negotiating the free data flow commitments at issue," Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and his colleagues wrote Oct. 26.
An analysis of the Rapid Response Mechanism, aimed at bolstering the rights of Mexican workers in USMCA, says it's early yet to see if it raises wages and employment in export-intensive sectors, and if the U.S. is successful in replicating the approach in other trade agreements.
The Senate Finance Committee's chairman and its top Republican jointly told U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai that she must make clear that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will immediately respond to Canada enacting any sort of digital services tax, "using available trade tools." Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, wrote that in italics, for emphasis. "When you take these steps, you will do so with our full support," the two wrote Oct. 10.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai laid out her priorities for reforming the World Trade Organization, providing concrete options that the U.S. and other WTO members can take to reinvigorate the international trade forum. In a Sept. 22 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Tai said that the biggest tenets of WTO reform revolve around "improving transparency," rebuilding the body's ability to negotiate new rules for new challenges and dispute settlement reform.
An official from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative told Bangladesh "that supporting workers’ rights, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, is a top priority for the Biden-Harris Administration," according to a USTR readout of the Sept. 20 U.S.-Bangladesh Trade and Investment Cooperation Forum Agreement Council meeting.
The U.S. is asking that a rapid response labor mechanism panel decide whether Grupo Mexico's decision to hire replacement workers after a strike is a violation of union rights covered by the USMCA. The treaty says that the panel must be formed in three days after a request, and that the panel has 30 days to make a determination. This is the first time Mexico and the U.S. have disagreed on remediation after the U.S. filed a rapid response labor complaint, and the first time the U.S. called for a panel.