Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2667 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Argentina's Ministry of Economy issued Resolución 1254/2025 (Boletín Oficial, 27 August 2025) approving the adhesion of Generación Eléctrica Argentina Renovable I SA's dedicated branch ("GEAR I SDE") to the Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (RIGI) under Law 27.742, for the 180 MW "P.E. Olavarría" wind farm in Olavarría, Buenos Aires province. The declared total investment is USD 275.59 million (USD 255.11 million in computable assets), granting the project RIGI's 30-year tax, customs and FX-stability package. GEAR I SDE's accession dates to 25 July 2025; it must reach 40% of the minimum qualifying investment within two years and complete the minimum by 30 November 2027. The plant is designed to supply ArcelorMittal Acindar's Argentine steel plants directly rather than to export power, substituting an estimated 20% of national electricity consumption equivalent for the offtaker and qualifying for import-tariff relief on capital goods under Law 27.742 Article 190.

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/612 of 24 March 2025 amends the EU steel safeguard regime first imposed by Regulation (EU) 2019/159, materially tightening the tariff-rate quota (TRQ) system that governs imports across 26 product categories of finished and semi-finished steel. The Commission cuts the annual liberalisation rate (the volume by which TRQs grow each year) from 1% to 0.1%, effectively freezing the in-quota volumes available to third-country exporters at near-current levels through the safeguard's expiry on 30 June 2026. The regulation also repeals the carry-over mechanism that previously allowed unused quarterly TRQ volumes to roll into the next quarter for product categories under significant import pressure, and eliminates the ability of exporting countries to access the residual (other-country) quota in the final quarter of each safeguard year for those categories. The latter change forecloses the route by which Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Korean and Vietnamese mills had increasingly back-filled into unused Russian and Belarusian quota allocations after the 2022 sanctions disruption. Most adjustments enter into force on 1 April 2025; the slower liberalisation pace and the carry-over removal in the most pressured categories take effect 1 July 2025. The measure is the headline trade-policy deliverable of the European Steel and Metals Action Plan unveiled by the Commission on 19 March 2025, and it is explicitly framed as a defensive response to (i) global overcapacity in Chinese steel and (ii) anticipated trade diversion into the EU after the United States reinstated universal 25% Section 232 steel/aluminum tariffs on 12 March 2025. Above-quota imports remain subject to the 25% out-of-quota duty inherited from the 2019 safeguard.

On 19 March 2025 the European Commission adopted the European Steel and Metals Action Plan (COM(2025) 122 final, IP/25/805) — the first standalone sector-specific industrial-policy framework for the EU steel and base-metals industries (~2.6m direct + indirect jobs). The Plan bundles six work strands — affordable energy, trade defence and circularity (including announced replacement of the post-30 Jun 2026 steel safeguard with a "highly effective" successor measure and a melt-and-pour origin requirement), lead-market measures (Steel and Metals Industrial Decarbonisation Bank with a EUR 100bn target and a EUR 1bn pilot auction in 2025, "Made in EU" criteria in public and defence procurement), capacity and investment funding, scrap and critical-input circularity (including CBAM extension to downstream steel and aluminium products by end-2025), and skills / just transition.