October 3, 2024

European Trade Ministers Debate Terms of U.S. Talks

If the ministers can come to terms, their agreement to start the trans-Atlantic trade talks would enable Britain, a member of the European Union, to hail the official start of the trade round when the leaders of the Group of 8 biggest economies hold a summit meeting that gets under way Monday in Northern Ireland.

A trade pact would aim to cut tariffs and streamline regulations between Europe and the United States, which are already the world’s two biggest trading partners.

But before the talks can go ahead with the United States, the European Union’s 27 trade ministers, meeting in Luxembourg on Friday, must reach a unanimous deal to give the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, formal authority to start the negotiations.

The sticking point as the ministers convened Friday — France’s demand to exclude films, TV shows and other audiovisual services from the talks — could prompt the United States to require exclusions of its own. Such exclusions could limit the value of any eventual deal for both sides of the Atlantic.

France is arguing on behalf of Europe’s so-called “cultural exception” — in practice, a thicket of quotas and subsidies for audiovisual productions. Excluding such material from a trade deal would disappoint American technology and media companies, including the online movie distributor Netflix, which wants easier access to European markets.

Early this week, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told filmmakers in France that “the total exclusion” of audiovisual services from the negotiations “is not necessary.”

But France dug in its heels on Friday. Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, told her 26 counterparts in Luxembourg that she had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of why most other European governments were opposed to the French stance.

“You want to call into question a fundamental principle that’s part of the European project — the cultural exception,” Ms. Bricq told her counterparts. “And you have chosen to do this with a partner that dominates the world in the areas of audiovisual production with the tendencies and temptations that go with power,” Ms. Bricq said, referring to the United States.

In a thinly veiled reference to the European outcry over recent disclosures that the National Security Agency in the United States had gained access to e-mail, Web searches and other online data from many of the biggest Internet companies, Ms. Bricq added that “current events unhappily remind us” of American influence over the online world.

A day earlier, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, threatened to veto the start of the trade talks if audiovisual services were not sufficiently protected.

In contrast to France, however, Britain, Spain, Sweden and Denmark want to move quickly to begin talks to open protected business like the transportation of goods along the United States coastline and American government procurement markets at both the federal and state levels.

“Huge benefits are expected from this initiative,” Jaime García-Legaz, the Spanish secretary of state for trade, and Vince Cable, the British secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, said in a joint message on Thursday.

“The economic situation in Europe obliges us to be proactive,” they said. “We have to provide our companies and professionals with the best possible conditions to provide their goods and services in both markets.”

But how much progress Europe and the United States can make is an open question. Tariffs are already low, and the main goal — harmonizing regulations — is likely to pose a huge challenge for negotiators.

Europeans are generally more likely to see a need to regulate new technologies, including genetically modified foods and online services that already are dominated by American companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

There are also questions about their differences over regulations on car safety, pharmaceuticals and financial derivatives.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/business/economy/european-trade-ministers-debate-terms-of-us-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In Talks With the Chinese, Geithner Faces an Uphill Climb

By many accounts, including some from the Chinese, his odds of success on those issues are long. But on other topics, like the need to address Europe’s debt problems, the two sides may find more agreement.

Mr. Geithner, the point man for the Obama administration’s economic dealings with the Chinese, arrived here as fiscal and trade relations showed signs of fraying. Last month, the Chinese applied stiff tariffs on imports of American automobiles and in November, they opened an investigation into American subsidies to renewable-energy industries.

On the American side, President Obama left China out of a trade pact with East Asian countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that he announced in November. Washington is investigating or formally pursuing trade complaints on a range of goods, including solar panels, broiler chickens and steel pipes.

Mr. Geithner’s arrival coincided with a report that Mr. Obama was creating an interagency task force to search for unfair trade and business practices by the Chinese. That report, in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, said that Mr. Geithner would brief Chinese officials on the task force during his visit here.

American corporations in industries like telecommunications and financial services have increasingly complained that China continues to restrict their access to domestic markets, despite pledges of openness when China joined the World Trade Organization a decade ago.

Differences aside, the economic relationship between the two countries has become so broad that Mr. Geithner and his counterparts are expected to find common ground.

In meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday with Premier Wen Jiabao, Vice President Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan and Li Keqiang, vice premiers, the two sides are expected to focus on ways to keep Europe’s debt crisis from dragging the global economy back into recession.

At the first meeting Tuesday evening, Mr. Wang alluded to the global role facing the United States and China, saying the countries were “having important cooperation in the multilateral and global arena in the areas of economy, finance, trade policies and also G-20 related affairs.”

The visit also offers a chance for a meeting with Mr. Xi, the presumed successor to President Hu Jintao, before Mr. Xi travels to the United States this year.

Yet Mr. Geithner seems unlikely to gain many concessions on the two top issues for this visit: the valuation of the renminbi and American efforts to impose new financial sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program.

The United States has long complained that China keeps the renminbi artificially low to give its products a price advantage in foreign trade. China has allowed a slow appreciation of its currency against the dollar — in unadjusted terms, a gain of nearly 4.8 percent against the dollar in the last year, according to the Bank of China.

But some American economists say the renminbi would appreciate another 10 to 20 percent if the market set its value. The Obama administration said in December that China’s currency remained “substantially undervalued,” but it declined to call China a currency manipulator.

Mr. Geithner is sure to raise the issue of the renminbi this week. But he is unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing, said Li Xiangyang, the vice director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“Other currencies are dropping against the U.S. dollar right now,” he said in an interview. “The United States has no right to ask China to appreciate its currency when the global trade is declining, and China’s economy itself is facing the risk of decline.”

Mr. Geithner faces an equally hard task on the Iranian issue. In the last week, President Obama signed legislation that would deny foreign financial companies that buy Iranian oil access to the American financial system. Those sanctions aim to increase pressure on Iran to curtail what many say is an effort to build nuclear weapons.

The European Union is moving toward a ban on buying Iranian oil, and Japan and South Korea, two of Iran’s major customers, have indicated muted support for the Washington initiative. Mr. Geithner will seek to enlist China’s help, too.

But on Monday, a senior Beijing diplomat seemed to suggest that that idea had no chance of succeeding. The diplomat, the vice foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, repeated China’s argument that differences over Iran’s nuclear intentions “cannot be resolved by sanctions alone” and require more negotiations.

Mr. Cui dismissed the notion that China should try to sway Tehran by reducing or ending its purchases of Iranian oil or natural gas. “Regular economic and trade relations between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue,” he said. “We should not mix issues with different natures.”

China bought more than 11 percent of its oil imports from Iran in the first 11 months of 2011, up from 9.6 percent in the same period in 2010, Chinese customs statistics show. The Chinese also have a thriving business in oil services in Iran, having committed $120 billion to oil and gas projects there as of 2009, according to published reports.

China has historically been reluctant to support economic sanctions not approved by the United Nations. But its increasing isolation on the Iranian nuclear issue could lead it to take some other measure to meet American requests, like a direct message to Tehran, said François Godement, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Mia Li contributed research. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/business/global/a-long-shot-for-geithner-as-he-begins-beijing-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

U.S. and Colombia Near Trade Pact

Senior administration officials hailed what they called an action plan in which Colombia promised to expand its protection program for union leaders and to enforce its labor laws more vigorously, in part by hiring 480 more labor inspectors over four years.

A senior administration official said that Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, would be in Washington on Thursday to meet with President Obama and to announce the agreement.

Under the deal, the Colombian government said it would provide more protection to labor advocates, including shop stewards, union organizers and bargaining committee members. It also agreed to eliminate its current backlog of risk assessments of union leaders and members who have requested protection.

And it agreed to revise its plan to relocate and protect teachers who are considered at high risk of violence.

In addition, Colombia said it would enact, by June 15, tougher measures to criminalize actions that affect workers’ rights, including threats. And it directed the national police to assign 95 investigators, no later than this December, to support prosecutors handling cases involving crimes against union members.

Labor unions in the United States have long fought to block approval of the free trade agreement with Colombia, asserting that the country has done too little to protect union leaders and advocates — more than 3,000 of whom have been killed in the last three decades. Colombian officials said they have significantly reduced the killings.

Concerned about the killings and in the face of union pressures, many Democratic lawmakers have opposed a pact with Colombia and have pushed for changes, while many Republicans have urged that it be approved without further adjustments.

In a conference call on Wednesday, a senior administration official said the Santos government had adopted the action plan after intense talks with the Obama administration.

“The plan significantly expands the protections of labor leaders and organizers,” the official said. “It bolsters efforts to punish those who have perpetrated violence against union members, and we think substantially strengthens their laws and enforcement.”

Administration officials said now that Colombia has adopted the action plan, the administration hopes to sit down with Congressional leaders to discuss how to move forward with stalled free trade agreements with not just Colombia, but also South Korea and Panama. In addition, officials said they hoped to tie approval of the Colombia agreement to renewal of Trade Adjustment Assistance, which expired in February. That program, sidetracked by Republican opposition, provides aid to workers who lose their jobs because of trade.

Administration officials voiced confidence that the trade pact would increase American exports to Colombia, now $12 billion a year, by $1 billion a year.

The official said the agreement would “help preserve what is a very important market in Central and South America and help support job creation, which is still the President’s No. 1 agenda.”

A spokeswoman with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. said the labor federation was studying the agreement and was not ready to comment.

Under the pact, more than 80 percent of American consumer and industrial goods would become duty free immediately, with the remainde having duties phased out over 10 years. Regarding agricultural goods, more than half of American products will become duty free, with duties ending for the remainder over 15 years.

The United States Chamber of Commerce hailed the Colombia deal, saying officials would work with the White House and Congress to secure approval of the three pending trade agreements.

“Presidents Obama and Santos showed courage and pragmatism in striking this accord,” Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber’s president, said. “This proves the United States can still lead on trade.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=90d76aaa76b3c9812d4673063cc82295