EEC/HK Textile Negotiations:
Categorisation
1.
The main difficulty with the new categorisation system that the Community has proposed is that nobody understands it very much
and that seems to include the Community delegation.
2.
The importers in the Community certainly know little about it yet. We are told that the Commission intends to publish the new categorisation system later this month. We have also been told that no attempt was made to consult them when the new system was being drawn up.
3.
Hong Kong was made aware of this entirely new system in a rather extraordinary manner and only after we had arrived in Brussels on 10 October to
start negotiations. We wonder
if other supplying countries have been treated in the same way. We were given a list of products with the briefest descriptions and told that we could work it all out ourselves by reference to the list and to the NIMEXE numbers against each description. But, here is catch 22; the NIMEXE that is attended to apply as from 1 January 1978 will not be published until 19 December 1977.
4.
Therefore the technical experts on the two sides had to get together to try and determine precisely what products the Community had asked Hong Kong to restrain. The new categor- isation proposed is radically different from the one in the present agreement and in many areas the Community is uncertain as to the appropriate categories into which certain products should fall. This is bound to lead to classification problems
the future. That is to say that there is bound to be disagreement as to how products should be classified and hence what categories they should fall into.
in
5.
The more immediate problem for Hong Kong is that this entirely new and imprecise classification has made it almost impossible to produce any meaningful trade figures to match
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