News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Friday, April 25, 2025
Wang Shouwen, China’s vice minister of commerce and deputy director of international trade negotiations, and Hong Xiaodong, director of the World Trade Department, briefed journalists about China’s position on World Trade Organization reform. Below is a translated excerpt of their comments. For the full text, including the Q&A with journalists …
One has to wonder what Cecilia Malmström heard in Washington this week that spurred her to step up her warnings about the urgency of modernising the World Trade Organization at a conference hosted by the French economics ministry today.
This week’s midterm election will probably have little impact on the Trump administration’s trade policies, though the Democrats have a role to play in ratifying the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement and oversight of new trade negotiations.
With Australia’s ratification this week of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal is now set to kick in next month. The accord, which will provide freer trade and investment access among its 11 members and link up markets with a combined gross domestic product of $13.4 trillion, …
US duties on steel and aluminium are not only taking a toll on countries across the globe, but they’re triggering a “wave of direct and indirect actions and reactions” that is likely to expand in the coming weeks and months. “Obviously one country’s action becomes the second country’s reason to …
Next week, Canada will unveil to a group of World Trade Organization members a discussion paper outlining consensus-based solutions that Ottawa says will bolster the global trading system. The problem is that the US – which isn’t part of that group – has already identified major elements of the Canadian …
Dennis Shea must have been wearing his dancing shoes when he spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Friday. The US ambassador to the World Trade Organization pirouetted around most of questions that, had they been answered, would have offered some new insights into the …
President Donald Trump said he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it was a “horrible deal” that stole American jobs while benefiting big corporations. But Washington’s new agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, has incorporated many elements from TPP (reborn as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement …
Washington’s insistence that the World Trade Organization must be modernised before it gets behind proposals to fill Appellate Body vacancies begs the question: Why hasn’t the US come up with its own proposals to reform the Geneva-based trade body? The Trump administration said in its February Trade Policy Agenda that …
He’s done it again: US President Donald Trump took credit for clinching a “wonderful” deal with Canada after Washington and Ottawa said they had reworked the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement just weeks after Mexico accepted a revision of the trilateral pact. Sunday’s announcement came six days after Trump finalised …
