Economy & Business - August 2021

ECUADOR | Import tariff reductions. Ecuador’s deputy production & industry minister, Carla Muirragui, said on 3 August that a recent executive decree reducing import tariffs on 667 products across 81 sectors will benefit 6,381 domestic companies that employ some 560,000 people. There is scope for further expansion of the tariff reduction, which was introduced on 1 August and ordered “corrections” in import tariff rates. Muirragui said that this represents “the largest tariff reform” that Ecuador has seen in “close to 12 years” (smaller tariff reductions were introduced in 2013, 2019, 2020, and May 2021). She said that the government had considered “the demands of the productive sectors” and that more import tariff reductions could be introduced “over the next six or eight months”.