Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2662 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 19 March 2026, USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer and Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, METI, and Ministry of Finance jointly released the "United States-Japan Action Plan for Critical Minerals Supply Chain Resilience" — the operational follow-on to the 27 October 2025 US-Japan Framework. The Action Plan formally commits both governments to develop a plurilateral trade initiative in critical minerals "supported by price floors or other measures", to consult on embedding "border-adjusted price floors" in a binding plurilateral agreement, and to identify specific mining/processing/manufacturing projects in the US, Japan, or third countries for prioritised joint financing. It is the first formal US/Japan trade-policy commitment to administered floor-pricing as an instrument of critical-minerals trade governance, and explicitly invites third countries to join the contemplated plurilateral.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14273, "Delivering Most- Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients", on 12 May 2025. The EO directs HHS, USTR, and Commerce to pursue mechanisms (negotiation targets, importation pathways, and trade-policy levers) to bring the prices Americans pay for innovative prescription drugs into alignment with the *lowest* prices paid by other comparably-developed nations — the "most-favored-nation" (MFN) benchmark. Unlike the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act drug-price-negotiation provisions (which apply to a handful of Medicare Part D drugs), the EO applies pressure across the broader pharmaceutical pricing surface. As of April 2026, 17 major pharmaceutical manufacturers (incl. Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Merck, AstraZeneca, Regeneron) have signed bilateral agreements bringing US drug prices toward the international- benchmark level for selected medications.

On 11 April 2025, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sanctioned without vetoes Lei nº 15.122/2025 ("Lei da Reciprocidade Econômica"), published in the Diário Oficial da União on 14 April 2025 and effective the next business day. The statute — Brazil's first standalone economic-retaliation framework — empowers the Executive to suspend (i) trade concessions on imports of goods and services, (ii) intellectual-property rights and obligations under Lei 12.270/2010, and (iii) concessions or commitments assumed under trade agreements, as countermeasures against unilateral measures by individual countries or economic blocs that negatively impact Brazilian international competitiveness, including environmental requirements stricter than Brazil's own. Decreto nº 12.551 of 14 July 2025 (DOU 15 July 2025) regulates the law, creating the Comitê Interministerial de Negociação e Contramedidas Econômicas e Comerciais (CINCEC), chaired by MDIC with seats for Casa Civil, Fazenda and Itamaraty (Relações Exteriores), and establishes both a fast-track provisional countermeasure procedure (CINCEC-only) and an ordinary track (≥5 months) routed through SE-CAMEX, GECEX, the CAMEX Strategic Council and a 30-day public consultation.

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.

Sri Lanka's Economic Transformation Act, No. 45 of 2024, enacted by Parliament on 25 July 2024 and gazetted on 9 August 2024, is the foundational statutory rewrite of the country's post-default FDI and trade-policy architecture. The Act repeals the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka Law, No. 4 of 1978 (Section 194) and replaces the BOI with five new institutions: the Economic Commission of Sri Lanka (primary investment-approval and oversight body), Investment Zones Sri Lanka / Zones SL (SEZ management), the Office for International Trade (separating trade-policy from investment-policy functions), the National Productivity Commission, and the Sri Lanka Institute of Economics and International Trade (SLIEIT). The Act also codifies binding fiscal targets aligned with the IMF EFF conditionality — primary surplus of 2.3% of GDP by 2032, revenue exceeding 15% of GDP from 2027, debt-to-GDP below 95% by 2032, and GDP growth of at least 5% by 2027 — making it the parent statutory instrument under which subsequent FDI- incentive and tariff-reform sub-instruments operate.