The Diplomat
The Government of Spain has welcomed the agreement reached yesterday by European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, which puts an end to 17 years of disputes over Airbus and Boeing and the resulting tariffs imposed in 2019 by Washington against European and Spanish products.
“The Government of Spain welcomes the agreement between the European Union and the United States to suspend for five ̃ duties in October 2019 on Spanish and European products in the framework of the Airbus panel dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO)”, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism stated on its Twitter account.
As reported by the European Commission, the EU and the US have agreed – coinciding with his first bilateral Summit in seven years – to put an end to the differences they had been having since 2004 over subsidies granted to manufacturers Airbus and Boeing. The agreement also involves the suspension, for a period of five years, of the tariff countermeasures imposed by the two parties, which have had an economic impact of more than $11.5 billion and have harmed “companies and individuals on both sides of the Atlantic”-
“Today, with the Boeing-Airbus agreement, we have taken an important step towards resolving the longest-running trade dispute in the history of the WTO,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “I am pleased to see that, after intensive work between the European Commission and the U.S. administration, our transatlantic partnership is well on its way to cruising speed”. which “shows the new spirit of cooperation between the EU and the U.S. and that we can solve the remaining problems to our mutual benefit”, she added.
“The US and EU have achieved a breakthrough in the Boeing-Airbus trade dispute: we agreed to suspend our tariffs for five years, and we committed to ensuring a level playing field for our companies and our workers”, said US President Joe Biden from Brussels on the occasion of his participation in the EU-US Summit.
The EU-U.S. dispute over Large Civil Aircraft (also known as the Airbus-Boeing Controversy) has been the longest-running in the history of the World Trade Organization. It began in 2004, when the United States filed a WTO case against the EU, arguing that the European bloc was illegally subsidizing European large civil aircraft (LCA) manufacturer Airbus. The EU also filed a complaint against the U.S. in May 2005 for its illegal support of Boeing.
Following the WTO decisions authorizing each side to impose tariffs on the other, both the US (in October 2019) and the EU (in November 2020) imposed punitive tariffs on each other’s exports, affecting in total $11.5 billion worth of trade between the two sides. As a result, EU and US companies have had to pay more than $3.3 billion in customs duties, despite the fact that the two sides decided to suspend these penalties last March while negotiating the agreement reached yesterday.
Therefore, the new measure will serve to alleviate sectors punished by this conflict, such as oil, cheese or wine exporters. It is estimated that the US sanctions caused one billion euros in losses to Spanish exporting companies, mainly olive oil, wine and olives.
