THE PREFERENTIAL ORIGIN OF GOODS
Preferential Origin of goods has become one of the crucial topic in global trading, but this has recently raised some confusion.
This article does not imply handling the topic in details, which happens in more specific and more specialized discourse, but we’ll try to briefly introduce the issue from the exporter’s point of view.
The European Union has broadly tried to be more and more competitive worldwide through bilateral agreements with States or even with groups of States, ensuring that European products get duty benefits when they arrive on partner markets, or viceversa.
In order to benefit from those advantages, though, products are required to be actually manufactured in Europe. But what does it even mean for it to be European?
If it had to be wholly obtained in the European Union, this would therefore imply that even raw materials should be European. This is even more difficult to explain: how many products, apart from primary products, can be identified as European?
To tackle the issue, the idea of “sufficiently transformed” must be introduced: the term refers to products, which are not obtained from European raw material, but have undergone a major transformation on the European soil so that it can be actually considered European. However, the ideas of “major”, “significant” or “sufficient” can be hard to objectively define, especially in such a practical sector.
Therefore, detailed appendices have been included to describe each class of goods in detail, according to the Harmonized System, which is enough to determine whether the product is considered European or not.
Sometimes, manufacturing entirely transforms raw materials, and this usually happens when raw materials and final product belong to different classes of goods, but the rule is simply to apply, for example copper alloys can come from copper scraps. Other cases, where there are plenty of steps in production or the final product is not the direct transformation of the raw material but it is an assembly of different parts, can be trickier and more difficult to analyse, due to extremely complex rules; this happens especially with machineries or in the textile industry.
It becomes more and more important to verify any treaty which might interest us and to reach out to our suppliers to verify if our products meet the requirements in order to state their European origin and to benefit from duty exemption.
R.M.G. Raffineria Metalli Guizzi S.p.A., as producer of bronze and aluminium bronze ingots, is able to guarantee the European origin of its products and to provide to its clients the necessary documents in order benefit from the preferential treatment.
http://trade.ec.europa.eu/tradehelp/basic-rules
