TradeLane

This week we feature The Expeditors Podcast with host Chris Parker. The podcast shares observations, perspectives, and discussions on front-of-mind topics impacting the logistics and freight-forwarding industry through the lens of Expeditors, a global logistics provider. Expeditors generates highly optimized and customized supply chain solutions for their clients with unified technology systems integrated through a global network of 357 locations in 60+ countries on six continents.

As we reach the one-year pandemic mark here in the US, I’d like to congratulate you all on the ways that you’ve approached an unstable international trade environment. There were lots of curveballs thrown at us amidst an unprecedented disruption to the mechanics of most economies. There are additional hurdles in front of us, but recovery appears to be possible.

A United States Trade Representative (USTR) investigation into France’s Digital Services Tax (DST) was initiated on July 10, 2019, according to Sec 302(b)(1)(A) of the Trade Act of 1974 and was completed on December 2, 2019.

If I learned anything from 2020, it’s that I don’t know what is in store for the future. In the last few years, we went from talking about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would transform trade, to Brexit, to the trade war, to the global pandemic.

As 2020 winds down, the first year of C-TPAT’s new Minimum Security Criteria (MSC) is coming to a close. The new MSC’s went into effect at the beginning of the year, and in early June, the C-TPAT portal was updated to reflect these new criteria. Having worked with several C-TPAT members as they updated their programs, there are a handful of observations and best practices that I wanted to share.