U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said there is no interest in offering Taiwan "a very, very comprehensive, maximally liberalizing, aggressively liberalizing agreement." Tai, who was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum Dec. 7, was asked if the administration would pursue a free trade agreement with Taiwan, since Congress passed a bill welcoming such a negotiation. "We're not doing that with anybody right now," she added.
If a bill just introduced becomes law, importers of fossil fuels, refined petroleum products, petrochemicals, fertilizer, hydrogen, adipic acid, cement, iron and steel, aluminum, glass, pulp, paper, lime and gypsum products and ethanol would have to pay a duty at the border based on the carbon intensity of either the industry in the home country, the product, if a specific petition was made, or an economywide carbon intensity measure, if no reliable data is available by industry.
Textile gloves with a plastic coating on the palm and fingers are classifiable in the tariff schedule as gloves, not as articles of plastics, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a Dec. 6 opinion.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The Court of International Trade ruled Dec. 4 that a medical food company's imports would be classified as food, not as pharmaceutical products.
Wrangling over the federal budget has delayed an announcement of the particulars of phase VII of Lacey Act enforcement, as well as the subsequent six-month countdown until new declaration requirements are enforced, said Erin Otto, part of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s Lacey Act team, during a webinar hosted by the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America.
An importer can use a discounted price for transaction value as long as the discount was agreed to prior to the goods' importation, CBP said in a ruling posted last month. Allowing the importer's protest after an application for further review, CBP found that the unnamed electronic components distributor provided enough evidence to show the discounted price it claimed was the correct price based on the documents provided.
Automakers will have to track almost every battery component for electric vehicles -- including cathode electrodes, anode electrodes, solid metal electrodes, separators, liquid electrolytes, and solid state electrolytes that go into battery cells -- if they want consumers to be able to benefit from the full $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles.
Asian countries in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and businesses that export to those countries had low expectations for IPEF, and trade experts said it will take years to see if IPEF will have any commercially meaningful outcomes.
The top trade negotiator for the EU, Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, said the EU's political leadership sees "no prospect to agree on a concept" for a global arrangement on steel, to box out unfairly traded steel and privilege steel made with less carbon intensity.