APEC Countries Agree To List Of 'Green' Goods At Summit In Russia

摘要

Leaders from the U.S., China and other countries participating in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathered in Vladivostok, Russia Sept. 8-9 and announced a new, non-binding agreement to slash applied tariffs to below five percent on a list of 54 "green" goods by the end of 2015. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, this marks the first time that trade negotiations have produced such a list of goods for tariff cuts. Negotiators in the deadlocked World Trade Organization Doha round have tried for years to reach agreement on such a list, but were thwarted in part by Chinese and Indian sensitivities in this area. The APEC list is not as ambitious as what the U.S. has proposed in the the Doha round - in fact, it contains about one-third of the tariff lines on which the U.S. has pushed for tariff reductions in that context.