Word: nontariff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the first batch of Kennedy Round tariff reductions was going into effect last week, a wide assortment of other trade barriers loomed as high as ever. These are nontariff gimmicks designed to impede the inflow of foreign goods. Wine-producing France, for example, puts a crimp on bourbon and Scotch imports by prohibiting all whisky advertising. In Italy, foreign automakers find it difficult to buy prime time on the state-owned television. Switzerland not only restricts imports of milk products but gives special help-including price supports and low-cost feed-to Swiss dairymen whose cows graze in remote...
Though generally more subtle than tariffs, such practices are often equally effective in locking out the goods of other countries-and nobody knows this better than Lyndon Johnson. "Nontariff barriers," he said in his balance of payments statement last week, "pose a continued threat to the growth of world trade and to our competitive position." In particular, the President expressed concern over foreign-mostly European-nations whose tax systems give "across-the-board tax rebates on exports which leave their ports and impose special border tax charges on our goods entering their countries...
Blocking the Whortleberries. Yet tax measures are not always the most far-reaching nontariff barriers to trade. Impoverished Ghana, trying to combat its balance of payments problem as well as protect fledgling native industries, has simply ruled out import licenses for 79 products ranging from suitcases to incense. Industrialized Britain departs from its otherwise liberal trade policy by banning virtually all coal imports. In Japan, which officially restricts imports as disparate as golf balls and electric generators, the government uses friendly persuasion to get importers to cut traffic in other goods that are not formally excluded...
...denounced the pact. The chemical men promised a fight to prevent Congress from repealing the American Selling Price law-even though the U.S. exports chemicals worth three times its imports. The steelmakers' ire centers on the Kennedy Round's comparative failure to persuade other countries to end nontariff trade barriers, such as quotas, border taxes and import licensing. "We couldn't ship any steel into Japan if we gave it away," complains Chairman Edward J. Hanley of Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corp. "It's embargoed." Similar protectionist obstacles cover hundreds of products, from U.S. coal (barred from...
...Such nontariff trade restric tions as import quotas, indirect taxes and antidumping laws, which GATT members are also committed to consider, have little chance of being negotiated amid the complexities and confusion of the tariff debate...