Posted on 17 Apr 2019
After one year, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the US Department of Commerce has processed 61.9% of 45,328 exclusion requests to give relief to companies from Section 232 tariffs on steel imports. BIS has approved 21,464 applications and denied 6,588, while decisions on 17,276 are pending, Kallanish has learned.
According to a report on exclusion requests from Quantgov.org, the largest number of exclusion requests came for products from Japan (9,214) of which 55% were approved. This was followed by Spain (6,522) of which 27% approved and China (6,194) with an approval rate of 54%.
Exclusions requests for Canadian products totalled 2,595, of which 890 were approved, followed by Mexico (1,586) for which 830 approvals have been granted.
When looking at the exclusion approvals by the volume of steel, China’s approvals, totalling 430,443,696 kg, represent 57% of its 2017 import volume. Approvals for Japan, totalling 1,727,379,856 kg, represent 100% of its 2017 import volume. Canada’s approvals, totalling 134,648,232 kg, represent 2% of its 2017 volume.
This disparity was pointed out by the Canadian embassy last week.
“Despite being at the root of the global steel and aluminium oversupply problem, China has been one of the main beneficiaries of the 232 tariffs. As an ally to the US, Canada should have an immediate and permanent exemption to steel & aluminium 232 tariffs,” says ambassador David MacNaughton in a tweet.
Quantgov.org is an open-source government policy analytics platform run by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
