US Launches New Trade Probes into Auto Imports

On 23 May, US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced the initiation of an investigation into the national security implications of auto imports under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

This investigation follows in the footsteps of the US Commerce Department’s probes into whether steel and aluminium imports threaten national security, whose findings were sent to President Donald Trump earlier this year.

This new enquiry will analyse the impact of imported SUVs, vans, light trucks, and automotive parts into the US market. Under Section 232, the Secretary of Commerce can conduct comprehensive investigations to determine the effects of imported products on US national security.

In a letter to US Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Ross affirmed, “there is evidence suggesting that, for decades, imports from abroad have eroded our domestic auto industry.”

The Department of Commerce announced that the investigation would “consider whether the decline of domestic automobile and automotive parts production threatens to weaken the internal economy of the United States.”

Currently, Mexico is the top exporter of passenger vehicles and light trucks to the US followed by Japan, Canada, Germany, and South Korea. According to the Commerce Department, imports of motor vehicles into the US have grown 16 percent over the past 20 years.

To determine the effects of imports on national security, the Section 232 investigation will consider criteriasuch as whether there has been a “loss of skills or investment, substantial unemployment, and decrease in government revenue” as well as the “impact of foreign competition on specific domestic industries and the impact of displacement of any domestic products by excessive imports.”

The Official Notice of Request – published on Wednesday 30 May on the Federal Register and which officially set in motion the auto import probe – establishes that public hearings will be held on 19-20 July 2018. Secretary Ross then has a period of 270 days to conduct the enquiry and present the department’s findings to President Trump.

The administration will subsequently decide whether to apply tariffs, quotas, or other measures on the range of imported automobiles and auto parts that enter the US market. Any such action will be imposed within 15 days of the administration’s decision.

In the first semester of 2018, the department concluded two Section 232 investigations into steel and aluminium imports, breaking with a 17-year hiatus of government use of this type of probe. The Trump administration subsequently announced that it would impose a global 25 and 10 percent tariff on steel and aluminium imports as of 23 March.

Washington has since granted exemptions to some trading partners, normally in the form of quotas, and has given Canada, Mexico, and the EU until 1 June to reach an alternative arrangement to avert the duties.

Those steel and aluminium tariff hikes continue to cause tension across the globe, both in terms of their commercial implications as well as their potential risks to some of the key tenets of the multilateral trading system – namely, whether the use of unilateral measures on national security grounds by one of the world’s top traders could lead to a domino effect among other countries.

The existing steel and aluminium duties have prompted formal WTO dispute settlement complaints, most recently from India, along with formal announcements from Japan, Russia, and Turkey that they intend to suspend trade concessions to the US unless a solution is found.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has since informed the European Parliament that she believes that the bloc will likely face some form quota on steel and aluminium exports.

“Our future course of action will depend on the nature and the severity of measures imposed on our exports by the United States and the injury it does to our industry,” she said. Malmström further warned that restrictive quotas would prompt “immediate retaliation.”

The Section 232 investigation into auto parts corresponds with a renewal of US-China tensions on planned actions following the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Section 301 findings regarding China’s intellectual property and transfer of technology practices.

On Tuesday 29 May, President Trump announced that the US would impose a “25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology, including those related to the ‘Made in China 2025’ program.” The final list of covered imports is expected to be announced by 15 June.