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ARMENIA NTR GRANTED; TARIFF PROVISIONS APPROVED

WASHINGTON, DC - The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would make permanent normal trade relations, otherwise known as most-favored-nation status, with Armenia and make hundreds of small changes to US trade laws.

The bill passed by voice vote consists mostly of more than 300 provisions for tariff suspensions on imports of goods not produced domestically and traded in small volume.

Armenia already has normal trade relations with the US, renewed annually. The House-passed bill would make that status permanent. Imports from the handful of countries lacking normal trade relations are subject to much higher US tariffs.

Some House Democrats complained that they had no opportunity to include language about what they said were "continuing human rights abuses" in Armenia, but they nevertheless voted for the bill.
The House passed a similar miscellaneous tariffs bill in 2002, but the Senate never considered such legislation before that session of Congress adjourned.

The miscellaneous trade provisions are part of a larger legislative package including one-year extensions on a number of relatively minor tax provisions that are expiring plus a controversial measure aimed at helping ailing US airlines save money on pension costs.

The House-passed bill would cost about $7 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation. A rival bill pending action in the Senate would be revenue neutral.

Whether Congress can finish work on the bill in the next few days before recessing until January is far from clear.

Another provision would extend Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) tariff benefits to certain hand-knotted and hand-woven carpets, a measure that could help Pakistan, Turkey, Nepal, Egypt and Morocco.

Not in the bill was a provision that had passed in the 2002 House version aimed at giving benefits to Turkey. It would have created "qualifying industrial zones" in that country where certain goods produced jointly by Turkish and Israeli manufacturers could enter the US market duty free.

COLOR TELEVISIONS FROM CHINA "DUMPED"

WASHINGTON, DC - The US Commerce Department has ruled that imports of color television receivers from China were dumped on the US market.
 
The preliminary affirmative determination the department calculated the dumping margins ranged from 27.94% to 45.87%.
 
Commerce, however, ended the case against imports of the same goods from Malaysia.
Imposition of antidumping duties requires final affirmative determinations both from the Commerce Department that dumping occurred and from the US International Trade Commission (USITC) that the imports injured or threatened US industry.

Commerce is expected to make a final ruling next April.
 
The department also found a reasonable basis to believe that critical circumstances exist in regard to imports of color TV sets from China. If Commerce and USITC make final affirmative determinations on critical circumstances, antidumping duties may be applied retroactively on imports that entered the country since August.

Dumping is the import of goods at a price below the home-market or a third-country price or below the cost of production. A dumping margin represents by how much the fair-value price exceeds the dumped price.

While no US company produces TV sets under a domestic brand, several assemble them in the US for Japanese companies such as Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba.

One of the US assemblers - Five Rivers Electronic Innovations - filed the case in May, joined by communication and electrical workers' unions.

Earlier, a US committee chaired by Commerce decided to invoke safeguard measures allowing the Washington to impose temporary duties or quotas on imports of three textile products from China.

The Chinese government said it regretted the recent textiles decision, which it added would hurt "normal" trade between the two countries, according to news reports.
 
China also threatened to appeal to the World Trade Organization and cancelled an official buying trip to the US. Potential Chinese purchasing contracts were intended to alleviate growing US concerns about its huge trade deficit with China.

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