OBJECTIVES

The United States, as well as other 19 industrialized countries, established their own tariff exemption GSP.  The GSP is an unilateral and temporal program which establishes relative preferences to tariff exemptions granted by the USA to beneficiary countries (per development level) --developing countries: Ecuador and certain West Europe countries, among others.

IMPORTANCE AND DIMENSIONS

Under this program, since January 1976, the USA grants preferences originating from 149 countries (customer franchise) for about 4,200 commodities (AGRICULTURAL AND NON-AGRICULTURAL).  The program involves a great range of manufactured and semi-manufactured agricultural commodities, stipulating that certain commodities could not have tariff exemption due to some U.S. industries' susceptibility.  Such a restriction is applied to but not limited to:

· Agricultural commodities shown in chapters 2 to 52 (inclusive), subject to a quota, if

they over-passed such a quota.

· Clothing subject to previous agreements.

· Leather products

· Electronic articles

The U.S. renewed its GPS in August, 1996, including with a retroactive effect those imports performed since July 31^st, 1995, date in which the former GPS expired.  This Program is renewed yearly.

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