Day Late and a Dollar Short House Ways & Means Trade Subcommittee Ranking Democrat Earl Blumenauer (Oregon) has introduced legislation reauthorizing the long expired Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) and Miscellaneous Tariff Bill (MTB). The reauthorization includes lots of new obligations for beneficiaries such as labor rights and gender equality. However, the oddity is making the benefits retroactive. The GSP program expired almost three years ago. Companies importing goods since then have had no realistic expectation of getting the benefits. They imported because it was economically beneficial without the tariff breaks of GSP. It would provide an unnecessary subsidy except for one specific pur...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.