The trade conflict between the United States and China may have taken a turn for the worse this month, but the US has reportedly at least reached a positive trade agreement with Japan.
According to local media reports, both the US and Japan have apparently agreed to implement a broad deal on bilateral trade as early as September this year.
The agreement to set up a bilateral trade deal by September is aimed at bridging conflicting opinions on tariffs over various traded goods from agricultural to automotive products. US President Donald Trump previously brought up what he called unfair global trade imbalances.
The US president had urged Japan to set up a meeting with negotiators to speed up trade talks with the goal of opening up the countries' sectors for trade.
The United States is pushing for Japan to open up its politically sensitive agriculture sector and to curb its automotive exports. Japan has so far been able to meet some of Trump's requests, with the automotive sector investing heavily in establishing US-based manufacturing facilities in order to lessen its dependence on US-bound automotive component exports.
According to local media reports, the agreement to come up with a bilateral deal by September was reached during a meeting held last week. The meeting was attended by Japanese Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington.
Both parties reportedly agreed that a bilateral trade deal had to be reached prior to the scheduled meeting between Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the sidelines of the United Nations' general assembly.
The assembly is scheduled to take place in late September in New York. Both negotiators likely want the meeting between both leaders to start with a positive note, which could likely result in more positive trade deals down the road.
The topics of discussion during the meeting in Washington reportedly included trade requests from both sides. Japan is calling on the US to remove tariffs on Japan's exports of industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is asking Japan to reduce its current 38.5 percent tariffs on imported US beef products.
The US is also calling on Japan to further open its agricultural sector by making its products available to the US without imposing unreasonable tariffs.
Apart from the trade requests, reports have revealed that both negotiators had also reached a broad agreement regarding their relationship within the digital economy.
Under the agreement, digital products will be tariff-free and firms will be allowed to hosts servers without limitations. The agreement, which was reached in a working-level discussion, will still need to be finalized.
