Washington – The Computer & Communications Industry Association submitted comments with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) responding to a proceeding seeking perspectives on the intersection between trade policy and supply chain resilience.
In the comments, CCIA corrects the record regarding broad assertions that trade has undermined resilience and illustrates the many ways that various trade commitments—particularly in the digital realm—bolster supply chain resilience. CCIA is scheduled to testify at USTR’s May 2 hearing to provide testimony on this matter.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association has advocated for digital trade rules that strengthen the global economy for over 50 years.
The following can be attributed to CCIA Vice President of Digital Trade Jonathan McHale:
“Securing global supply chains and bolstering domestic investment incentives in the United States are deservedly top economic policy goals. But effective policy depends on credible diagnoses of problems. USTR’s Federal Register Notice devotes much of its space, and the premises of many of its questions, to broad-sweeping claims asserting that U.S. trade policy has been the source both of supply chain failures as well as of a wide set of societal ills such as job losses, environmental degradation, and the decline of communities. While these harms are real, overstating causal links between trade policy and negative economic impacts threatens to lead to policy that does away with all of the benefits that trade brings to resilience while also failing to address the genuine root causes of these issues.”
“Formal trade agreements can clearly play a positive role in addressing these issues. They can promote resilience by engendering confidence for investors to devote resources to growth in the U.S. market and ensuring burgeoning manufacturing industries in the United States, such as semiconductors, have fair access to the import and export markets they need. Commitments to promote cross-border data flows and prohibitions on unjust data localization are also critical to bolstering data security and ensuring that both goods and service suppliers operating in the United States can connect to foreign markets.”