GSP for Luggage and Travel Goods: Running the Numbers

I reported in May on a bill, H.R. 2139, to make certain luggage and travel goods eligible for duty-free entry under a program called the Generalized System of Preferences ("GSP"). Today I ran a report using the United States International Trade Commission's "Dataweb" to attempt to quantify the significance of this change. In 2012, the U.S. imported, from GPS eligible countries (that is eligible for GSP for other products, not travel goods, which are currently excluded), almost half a billion dollars of imports of products corresponding to the descriptions set forth in the bill. The total import duties collected on those shipments was $50 million. Furthermore, we may expect that, if those countries could export travel goods duty-free to the U.S., some of the current annual $8.5 billion in imports from other countries would shift productions to GSP eligible countries in order to take advantage of that duty savings. A list of the GSP eligible countries is available on the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative by clicking here. The detailed report on 2012 shipments from GSP countries is available on the Agathon Associates website by clicking here.