Firms manage to use free trade agreements to a high degree within a few years

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Import & export

About trade

Published: 14 Mar 2022

Companies manage to take advantage of over 90 percent of the potential duty savings already after three to four years after a free trade agreement has entered into force. This is shown in a new study from the National Board of Trade Sweden.

The report focuses on the trade aspects of the EU–South Korea free trade agreement (FTA). It analyses imports and the utilisation of available tariff preferences by Swedish importers between the years 2008 and 2018.

– We believe that many of the results in the report are universal and therefore valid for most of the EU's modern FTA:s, Jonas Kasteng, one of the authors of the report, says.

Companies mainly learn to use free trade agreements through their own practical experience, which is shown by the fact that the number of repeated import transactions is more important for the use of the agreement than the total time the company has imported.

Read the full interview and download the report

Learning by Using Free Trade Agreements – a firm and transaction-level analysis of the EU–South Korea FTA