Short reads, history lessons, expert interviews, and in-depth reports —
insights and analysis from the Zolltor research desk.
Five hundred years ago this August 9, the first European colony in North America was founded — and with it came the first documented enslavement of Africans on the continent, and the first revolt against it. Forced labor is still present in supply chains today, and Washington is now citing it as grounds for tariffs.
The U.S. will not extend the 2018 USMCA, instead starting a decade-long review that ends in expiry unless all three countries agree to renew. Read closely, the move looks less like a response to a broken agreement than to a presidential short attention span.
The mid-year update to the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule (2026 Rev. 11) introduces no MFN duty rate changes, but significantly reshapes product scope for Section 301 tariffs on China and implements widespread statistical reporting changes, particularly for chemicals and food products.
Ten years after the referendum, the UK has signed 40 trade agreements with 74 countries — yet most are copies of the EU deals it left behind, and British trade is lower than in 2015. Leaving the EU was the easy part.
A decade after the referendum, the cost of leaving is measured not only in trade statistics but in the small, telling details — a dessert that jumped 25% in a week, and a Monty Python-worthy moment of irony.
Washington frames new 12.5% and 10% tariffs on 59 countries and the EU as a stand against forced labor. Strip away the headline and what remains is a familiar attempt to find a legal route to tariffs the courts have repeatedly blocked.
At a Mexico City summit, the EU and Mexico signed a modernized Global Agreement and an interim Trade Agreement — replacing a 25-year-old deal and signaling that even stable trade relationships now need active maintenance.
The protectionist tariffs of the 1920s and 1930s show what happens when policymakers pursue short-term gains and fail to see how the world around them has changed. The parallels to today are hard to miss.
The end of World War II in Europe is rarely remembered in terms of trade — yet the leaders who had lived through 1930s protectionism built the EU and the WTO precisely to avoid repeating it.
When the Fairland docked in Bremen in 1966, the firms that adapted to containerization survived and the rest went under. A comparable structural shift — in tariffs and regulation — is underway now.
When multiple countries begin regulating the same product category at the same time, it’s an early signal of where compliance budgets will come under pressure. We analysed 12 months of WTO notifications to find these convergence waves.
Most companies track whether a market is adding regulations. Few track whether existing rules are being rewritten — yet 29% of markets are ‘Hardening,’ and re-certification is almost always costlier than first-time compliance.
WTO members must give notice of new trade regulations — but how much notice depends entirely on the country. Mapping 24 economies reveals three structurally different regulatory cultures: Shock, Pipeline, and Hybrid.
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the administration’s emergency-powers tariffs. But other statutory tariff tools remain — and the past year has already reshaped global trade. This is a twist in the road, not a reset.
Two days of discussion on the future of global trade left me with three clear themes: transparency matters more than ever, SMEs face the steepest challenge, and AI is already central to the conversation.
No briefs in this topic yet.