This May the executive meeting of the State Council, chaired by China’s Premier Li Keqiang, has decided to reduce again the tariff on certain kind of imported consumer goods. This is the fifth tariff adjustment in four years for daily life consumption product: the new regulation will start from 1 July 2018 and will cover a wide range of daily life products. More specifically, it involves a number of 1,449 items, from products such as clothes and cosmetics to washing machines.
The custom duties cuts shall cover almost every aspect of people’s daily life consumption. Let’s have a look to the details:
- the average tariff rate on imports of clothing, shoes, hats, kitchens and sports items will be reduced from 15.9% to 7.1%;
- the average tariff rate on imported household appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators will be cut from 20.5% to 8%;
- the average tariff rate on imported processed foods such as farming product and fishing products from mineral water and aquaculture will be reduced from 15.2% to 6.9%;
- the average tariff rate on imports of cleaning products, cosmetics such as skin care and hairdressing and some medical and health products shall be cut from 8.4% to 2.9%.
Looking at this data we note that this tariff cut is higher than the previous ones, but it still may be too small to be felt by the end consumers. The tariff is only a part of the imported product taxes and, basically, the taxes reduction on one individual category will not have a significant impact on the overall price. Despite this, lower import tariff could enhance the trade of imported goods also through more channels such as the e-commerce.
It’s too early to discuss about the impact this tariff reduction will have on the involved imported product, but for sure will create a more competitive market environment and at the same time upgrade the domestic industries, which shall be forced to improve product quality to compete with an increasingly flux of imported goods.
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