U.S., Britain to continue trade dialogue in Scotland in April
By Andrea Shalal
BALTIMORE, Md. (Reuters) -Prime commerce officers from the US and Britain will meet in Scotland in April after two days of talks within the U.S. port metropolis of Baltimore on forging deeper and extra inclusive commerce relations, and a shock deal on reducing tariffs.
British commerce minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan informed reporters on Tuesday the conferences had energized efforts by the 2 historic allies to work collectively extra carefully and “keep forward of the sport in a fast-changing world economic system.”
Trevelyan and U.S. Commerce Consultant Katherine Tai met with trade executives and labor unions, toured the Baltimore port, and visited a minority-owned digital know-how agency as a part of wide-ranging dialogues geared toward discovering new methods to broaden commerce and funding between the 2 nations.
“America is at its finest after we are working carefully with our allies,” Tai informed a information convention. “Secretary Trevelyan and I need to protect the historic nature of our particular relationship whereas making certain it correctly addresses the pressing challenges of at this time’s world.”
They each famous that shut cooperation between Washington and London of their response to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine underscored the ability of cooperation by democracies.
The 2 commerce officers spoke shortly earlier than Trevelyan met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and sealed an settlement that lifted U.S. tariffs on UK metal and aluminum, and retaliatory British tariffs on U.S. bikes, whiskey and different merchandise.
In a joint assertion on the commerce dialogues, Tai and Trevelyan stated they’d recognized areas for deeper cooperation, together with defending labor rights and the atmosphere, selling provide chain resilience, and supporting the low-carbon transition.
They stated it was additionally important to make it simpler for small- and medium-sized companies to participate in world commerce, together with by enhanced entry to financing, and be certain that the advantages of commerce have been distributed throughout their nations.
Requested about resuming formal negotiations on a bilateral free commerce settlement, Tai stated such offers have been “very twentieth century instruments” and it was essential to search for inventive, modern options given new challenges.
Whereas the US and the European Union had arrange a commerce and know-how council, Tai cautioned that “one dimension doesn’t match all,” and stated the US and Britain had their very own explicit shared values.
Trevelyan stated Britain stood prepared to tug collectively a free commerce settlement, however added that the aim of the U.S.-UK present dialogue was “to essentially give you the option to consider the place we need to be going with our relationship.”
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; further reporting by David Lawder; Enhancing by Mark Porter, Grant McCool and Leslie Adler)
