Asian economies figure prominently on a list of 55 nations that Washington accuses of unfairly using trade barriers against US exporters.
China and Japan, among America's biggest trading partners, attracted long and detailed criticism in the annual review, formally entitled the "National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers."
The US is running record trade deficits. And, the biggest imbalance last year was with China, a trade gap of US$124 billion. That's the largest deficit ever recorded with a single country.
The trade barriers report, released in Washington on Thursday, devoted 39 pages to a discussion of barriers erected by China.
This includes a review of the efforts by US President George W. Bush's administration to get China to stop linking its currency, the yuan, to the dollar.
US manufacturers complain that the practice undervalues the Chinese currency by as much as 40 percent, giving products from that country a huge competitive advantage against American goods.
Japan, which until recently had the largest trade surplus with the US, came in for 34 pages of discussion in the report, the same number of pages devoted to discussing trade practices in the EU that the US found objectionable.
Other Asia-Pacific economies cited were: Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Vietnam.
The report is intended to guide the Bush administration negotiating strategy in the coming year in attacking barriers that cause the greatest harm to US companies.
If direct talks with a country do not produce results, then the administration can bring a case against the country before international regulators with the WTO.
Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers have written to Bush, urging his administration to negotiate with five key trading partners -- China, the EU, Japan, South Korea and India -- over such issues such as Japanese and South Korean barriers to American cars and auto parts as well as European subsidies to airplane-maker Airbus and India's policies for its textile industry.
The Democrats complained that the Bush administration has failed to aggressively pursue unfair trade cases with other countries, averaging just three per year in its first three years in office, compared with an average of 10 WTO cases filed annually by former president Bill Clinton's administration.
The group asked the administration to file WTO cases against the four individual countries and the EU if negotiations don't produce results within two months.
The Democrats also said they were introducing legislation to put back into effect a portion of a US trade law known as "Super 301."
This would set deadlines for the administration to bring WTO cases against the worst trade barriers identified by the annual report.
In response, Bush officials said the administration did not shy away from filing WTO cases but only did so after efforts at country-to-country agreements failed.
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