News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Friday, April 25, 2025
This week has been dominated by news and gossip surrounding the nomintion of a successor for the WTO’s outgoing director general. Today, Nigeria announced it was planning to nominate former finance minister and World Bank official Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala – a high profile nomination to say the least. The nomination period …
A few weeks before the Big Lockdown, the European Union announced it was suspending trade preferences enjoyed by Cambodia under Brussels’ flagship duty-free-quota-free trade regime for the world’s poorest countries. Despite the severe economic and supply chain damage wrought by the pandemic, the EU still appears to plan on pressing …
The European Commission released a widely anticipated ‘delegated act’ in which, for the first time in the scheme’s almost fifteen-year history, suspends free trade rights for one of the poorest countries in the world. About 20% of Cambodian exports to the EU are covered by the planned preference withdrawal measures. …
The European Commission has circulated initial proposals to an ‘expert group’ on the extent of suspensions of duty-free-quota-free export rights it currently grants to Cambodia. Apparel, footwear, travel goods and sugar from the fast-growing South East Asian country are among the products that will face the reintroduction of duties and …
Today, the Commission made official its intention to remove Nauru, Samoa and Tonga from its list of beneficiaires under its General System of Preferences. It also released an amendment to a ‘vulnerablity threshold’ that caps imports of certain products into the EU. “The recent release of World Bank statistics (1 …
The European Commission is handling a major file related to upholding international democracy norms in Cambodia through trade policy in a rather secretive fashion. Is it really following the rules in doing so? The Cambodian government has one month to respond to calls from the European Union to give opposition …
The questions Phil Hogan was least comfortable with were those around digital trade and European plans to establish a multilateral investment court. The more than two hour hearing with MEPs from the international trade committe was uneventful and dry – addressing at times the minutiae of ‘rules of origin’ in …
This article is the first in a series of pieces Borderlex is planning to publish over the autumn 2019 to take stock of the European Union’s trade defence instrument policy at a critical turning point both in the multilateral trading system and in the EU’s trade defence practices. Since 2014, …
In January 2019, the European Union reintroduced restrictive quotas on imports of rice from Cambodia and Myanmar following a complaint from Italy that these were harming its own rice growers. Cambodian rice farmers won’t just let that pass. So-called Indica rice from the two countries is now subject to a …
This week was dominated by news on European trade defence policy and by a shift in sentiment in Britain over a customs union with the EU – with ramifications for the Department for International Trade. Other bits of news below. EU-Australia negotiations: third round The EU and Australia held a …
