The United State is a market with high consumption. Its annual importing turn over is estimated 1,200 billion US dollars. The United States has, however, a complicated policy of controlling imported goods.

In addition to the requirements on customs, prohibition regulations, import limitation is also affected by many regulations under the control of public authorities. In these cases, imports are passed only if they can meet the requirements laid down in the relating regulations. Especially, some of the specific technical barriers in this market have many differences with those in many other ones.

No use of international standards

Applying the standards established by the international organizations in the United States is of comparatively low proportion. Those standards are even unknown in this country even though every parties participating in the Agreement on Technical Barriers to trade pledged to apply the international standards widely. While quite many of the standards of the United State are considered “equivalent to the international standards in term of techniques,” few international standards are applied directly. Some America standards are even in contrast with the international ones. One example for this point is the standards of electric and electronic products in America which are completely different to the international ones. On top of that, in this country, there is no common market in the whole federation for this kind of products because of the differences in technical requirements and product standards between the federation and states. As a result, overseas manufacturers have to change their standards to suitable to the requirements if they want to sell their products in different places in the United States.

There are more than 2,700 stated governmental institutions and city ones which have specific regulations on technical and safety standards to products sold or resembled in the scopes of those institutions. Usually, the requirements are not identical. Sometimes, some states impose standards on environment which are higher than those imposed by the federation. Even though the above mentioned regulations do not differentiate between domestic and imported products, the domestic enterprises usually sell better in the domestic market because they have been operating there for many years and therefore, they know all the technical requirements, standards, and products of other companies in America. Accordingly, they can change their products to meet the technical requirements, and standards in different areas and states.

To the overseas companies, especially companies in Vietnam where most of the companies have little experience in importing and exporting, collecting necessary and relating information to meet the required regulations is an enormous challenge. One company in European Union has estimated that the complication of requirements on standards and quality certification caused them to lose about 15% of their total sale turn over among them, certification expenditure made up 5% of their total sale turn over. Expenditure for responsibility insurance to the goods according to America’s law is not a small sum.

Rely so much on compelled certificates

While there is a global trend for limiting the interference of the third party into managing product quality, in the United States quality management of kinds of industrial products is still relying on quality certificates of the third party. In some fields such as fields of electric equipments and household products, technology development and consumers’ knowledge allow many countries in the world to reduce the requirement on piloting and quality certifying before marketing the products. They will rely mainly on quality certificate of producers and supervisions and control of stated departments of quality management after the products are launched and distributed in the market. Nevertheless, in America, quality certificates of the third party are still a compelled requirement both legally and habitually. This requirement leads to additional expenditure which is unreasonably high to the overseas suppliers. Moreover, waiting time for the testing, quality certificate issuing may take away their chances to tap into the market.