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Paraguay

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On October 25, 2019, USTR announced that President Trump is suspending $1.3 billion in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) based on its failure to adequately provide internationally-recognized worker rights. In addition, the President is restoring some GSP benefits for Ukraine following its passage of legislation aimed at addressing shortcomings in its intellectual property (IP) regime. USTR also announced it is opening new GSP eligibility reviews for two countries:  South…

On 24 August 2019, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) announced that delegations from Member States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) and of Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) convened in Buenos Aires on 20 to 23 August to continue their talks on a broad-based free trade agreement. This tenth round allowed the Parties to conclude the negotiations in substance in all areas. Note by the EFTA Secretariat states:…

On 31 January 2018, the Official Journal published Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/148 of 27 September 2017 amending Annexes II, III and IV to Regulation (EU) No 978/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council applying a scheme of generalised tariff preferences which revised the listings of several countries under the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP), which is reviewed each January. Regulation (EU) 978/2012 provides that a country that has been classified by the World Bank as a high-income or an upper-middle income country for 3 consecutive years, or a country that benefits from a preferential market access arrangement which provides the same tariff preferences as the GSP, or better, for substantially all trade, should not benefit from GSP, although GSP benefits will continue for 1 year after entry into force of a change in status to high-income or an upper-middle income country for 3 consecutive years, and 2 years after the date of application of a preferential market access arrangement so that the GSP beneficiary country and economic operators are given sufficient time for an orderly adaptation to the country’s GSP status revision. Accordingly, the following actions have been taken:

On July 14, 2017, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) published in the Federal Register a notice providing country-by-country allocations of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 (October 1, 2017 through Sept. 30, 2018) in-quota quantity of the tariff-rate quotas for imported raw cane sugar, certain sugars, syrups and molasses (also known as refined sugar), specialty sugar, and sugar-containing products.

Member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are required under the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) to report to the WTO all proposed technical regulations that could affect trade with other Member countries. The WTO Secretariat distributes this information in the form of “notifications” to all Member countries. The chart below summarizes notifications from the WTO in English received and posted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during the past month.

On June 18, 2015, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) announced that the United States and Paraguay signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on intellectual property rights (IPR) during a June 18 meeting of the United States-Paraguay Partnership Dialogue at the Department of State. As part of the MOU, Paraguay has committed to take specific steps to improve its IPR protection and enforcement environment. Additionally, the MOU creates a bilateral partnership in which…