New FTA report from Swedish National Board of Trade

New report by Kommerskollegium | National Board of Trade Sweden: “Learning by Using Free Trade Agreements”.

Main findings:

✅Firms learn to use free trade agreements by making repeated import transactions (“learning by doing”), time active in trade is of less importance

✅Using various suppliers is more important than importing different products for achieving high utilization of tariff preferences

✅The survival rate among importers over time is low, about 50 % of newcomers are only active for one year and tend to not make use the tariff preferences

✅ Consecutive importers, however, tend to make use of the available tariff preferences to more than 90 % after three years – and up to 97 % after five years
✅ The increase in the utilization of tariff preferences is rather due to increased import values per company than in an increase in the total number of companies over time

You can read the report here: https://www.kommerskollegium.se/globalassets/publikationer/rapporter/2022/learning-by-using-free-trade-agreements-a-firm-and-transaction-level-analysis.pdf