The United States plans to impose import tariffs on six countries as a countermeasure to introducing a digital tax, which mainly affects sizeable American tech companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google.
These are US taxes on goods from the United Kingdom, Austria, Turkey, Spain, Italy and India.
The taxes on products from those countries involve an amount of almost 1 billion dollars. These include Turkish carpets, Austrian concert pianos and leather goods, Italian fish and tailor-made suits, gold jewellery from India, shrimp from Spain and cosmetics from the United Kingdom. The rates can be as much as 25 percent of the import value.
The amount roughly corresponds to what the countries will collectively levy on digital taxes on American tech companies. Those companies think the tax is unfair. This concerns taxes on income from, for example, search engines, online advertisements and other digital activities.
Work is underway on a worldwide standard for digital taxation for large tech groups under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The US says it is open to a global standard but will continue to look at its own options in the meantime.