Tradelinks: Along with China, will Cuba and Swaziland flavor U.S. trade stew?
By Arthur Gorlick
Three separate events that bubbled to the surface recently could eventually change the flavor of the international trade stew for decades.
The Senate, by an 83-15 vote, cleared the way for permanent trade relations between the United States and China, giving China's 1.3 billion consumers the same trading status as most other nations.
The U.S. International Trade Commission held public hearings into the economic impact of U.S. sanctions on Cuba.
And the U.S. ambassador to Swaziland, an African kingdom of almost one million population, told a Seattle symposium that trade and investment opportunities abound in the Southern Africa region.
The White House said granting permanent trade relations status to China will mean that the giant Asian nation will import $2 billion annually in additional U.S. agriculture within five years.
Tariffs on imported U.S. industrial products will fall and those on computers, semiconducters and other electronic items will vanish, allowing shipments of billions of dollars worth of U.S. products to flow into China.
ng China to more U.S. products is expected to reduce the balance of trade deficit that has grown steadily. In 1998, for example, China had trailed only Japan as the nation with the largest trade deficit with the United States - $58.9 billion, according to U.S. Department of Commerce statistics.
Imports from China amounted to $71.1 billion while U.S. exports totaled $14.2 billion.
Sales of computer software, not calculated into the balance of trade statistics because they are considered a license rather than a manufactured product, is expected to soar.
Microsoft reportedly made $2.5 billion in the Asian market last year, about 11 percent of its total sales, and officials at Boeing expect billions in additional airplane sales.
Even as the balance of trade deficit continued to grow, the U.S. ranked as the world's largest merchandise exporter in 1998, followed by Germany and Japan. But U.S. merchandise exports declined to $634.7 billion in 1998, while imports rose to about $907.6 billion, up from $219.2 billion in 1997. Most of the U.S. exports - 72 percent - consisted of manufactured products.
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