EU-US negotiations over a steel and aluminium pact will make progress once the two sides reach an agreement over the EU’s digital rules, US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said in Brussels on Monday.
After a meeting between Lutnick, US trade representative Jamieson Greer and the 27 EU trade ministers, Greer highlighted US concerns that the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act only impact US firms, despite the EU insisting it is not discriminating against them.
“Enforcement is quite aggressive,” he noted during a press briefing monitored by Kallanish. “At times … complying with the law can become challenging. Sometimes our companies feel like the goal posts are moved. The fines can be quite large.”
Lutnick suggested the EU’s trade ministers “deeply consider trying to analyse their digital rules.” He added: “If they can come up with that balanced approach, which I think they can, then we will, together with them, handle the steel and aluminium issues and bring that on together. So that is on the table.”
The US expects the EU to propose a digital rules framework it is “comfortable with” and “understands”, and for the outstanding cases to be resolved. Once that occurs, “we can go and attack the steel and aluminium, try to come up with a list and a model that works very, very well for the European Union, and resolves many of these issues in a very positive way,” Lutnick added.
European Commissioner for Trade Maroš Šefčovič said reducing US tariffs on EU steel and derivatives, as well as tackling global overcapacity are priorities, while the EU’s new tariff-rate quota system proposal “speaks volumes about how seriously we take this issue”.
Steel derivatives are of special importance. “I think that especially if you look at capital goods, steel products, where we are talking about machinery, where we are talking about the robots. I think we both, I would say, realise that America wants to industrialise and a big part of it are also the machines which are supplied from the European Union to the United States of America. So I’m very glad that with the secretary, we discussed how we can actually launch the discussion on the steel and derivatives.”
When it comes to steel products exports, “we are not each other’s problem, because we do not export that much steel to each other, but we have a common issue, and this is global overcapacity, and with the recent safeguards which we adopted, which is, I think, [are] very, very similar to the measures which the US has taken to protect the market, that now we have all the preconditions in starting this discussion in earnest,” he added.
“And we’ll be looking into the ways how we can … launch this process on the digital matters,” he continued.
Adam Smith Austria
kallanish.com
