The US said it saw "real interest" in concluding free trade agreements (FTA) with South Korea and Malaysia, as crucial talks resume in the new year to strike deals ahead of the expiry of US President George W. Bush's trade-negotiating authority.
The fourth round of negotiations between the US and Malaysia began in San Francisco on Monday while the sixth round of talks with South Korea will be held next week.
"I think there is a real interest in concluding a high quality agreement in both cases -- South Korea and Malaysia," US Trade Representative spokesman Stephen Norton said.
"In any negotiations, there are sensitive subjects and we are dealing increasingly with complex economies and the negotiations can get complex, but I do think that the interest in concluding the agreement is very strong on both sides," he said.
The Bush administration needs to forge deals by early April in order to submit it to lawmakers before the president's powers to strike FTAs expire in June.
The US and Malaysia had detailed discussions on critical areas such as labor, financial services, autos and government procurement in the last round of talks in Kuala Lumpur and want to make more progress this week, officials said.
"A major problem is that we will have to get over with the fundamental approach to the whole negotiations -- the US side uses a `negative list' approach while Malaysia goes for a positive list approach - -- and this seems completely opposed to each other," one official familiar with the negotiations said.
Washington's general policy is to include in its negotiation list only areas which it wants the other side to liberalize. Malaysia incorporates in its list only areas it is prepared to open up.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Malaysia had stoutly defended US attempts to prise open the developing economy's financial services sector and to liberalize industrial relations in the electronics sector, where Kuala Lumpur allows only so called "in-house" unions.
The Democratic party, which won control of the US Congress in November elections, has signaled it will press for better labor and environmental standards in free trade agreements.
Norton said Malaysia, the 10th largest US trading partner, "is fully aware that we cannot conclude an FTA without the inclusion of a labor chapter."
He added that both sides had exchanged initial market access offers in goods and agriculture at the last round and that "the initial offers that we received from Malaysia were a solid basis for continued negotiations."
Asked whether there was optimism a deal with Malaysia could be concluded by April, Norton said: "We will just have to see how it goes this week, whether we need additional rounds and our goal still is to conclude the negotiations before trade promotion authority expires.
"We are doing everything we can to make that possible," he said.
The negotiations with South Korea beginning on Jan. 15 in Seoul are expected to be more complex.
South Korean and US officials are at odds over Seoul's decision to ban three shipments of US beef over small bone fragments even though it has lifted a three-year import ban imposed following US cases of mad-cow disease.
The issue is not part of the free trade talks but helped sour the atmosphere of the fifth round.
Neither side can afford to miss a "once in a lifetime opportunity," William Oberlin, new chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, said recently.
An FTA with South Korea would be the US' biggest deal since the creation of the North American NAFTA pact in 1994, which married two economies -- Canada and Mexico -- whose bilateral trade last year totaled US$72 billion.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not
RSS