Foreign trade zones (or free ports)

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1801857903

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-199077

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Foreign trade zones (or free ports)

Place of publication:: Washington

Publisher:: United States Government Printing Off.

Year of publication:: 1929

Scope:: IX, 322 S; Ill., graph. Darst

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part 1. General analysis

Collection:: Economics Books

FOREIGN TRADE ZONES 5 of Germany had their own tariff laws, but by 1828 the Customs Union was organized with a common tariff on the frontier. Lubeck, Ham- burg, and Bremen, however, long continued to be free and inde- pendent cities, and it was not until 1888 that Hamburg and Bremen finally agreed to enter the German Customs Union. FREE TRADE PORTS To facilitate international trade many ‘free trade ports” were established in Europe, some as early as the sixteenth century. These are often confused with the free ports as they are known to-day, and naturally so, as some of them through appropriate changes have become free ports in the sense in which this term is now applied. Leghorn was made a free trade port in 1547 and flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the free port as now in existence was not established until 1883. The free trade port of Trieste, which was established in 1719, was suppressed by the Vienna Government, and the free port or free zone was organized and began to operate in 1891. Marseille was made a free trade port in 1669, Naples in 1633, Venice in 1661, Fiume in 1719, and Ancona and Messina in 1732. Genoa is referred to as a free port as far back as 1623, but the free port law of 1876 is the basis for the regulations and decrees providing for the government and operation of the free zone. The free trade ports which were established in Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries were later abandoned or modi- fied so as to make them consistent with modern requirements. Cus- toms tariffs for the different countries as a whole were formulated, superseding the individual tariffs of the states and cities. The free cities, or “Iree trade cities” as we use the term, offered opportunities for smuggling and impeded the administration of the customs laws. Under these conditions it was logical that they should be abandoned in favor of segregated, fenced, and guarded areas, in which the re- quirements of transshipment trade could be met without these dis- advantages or dangers. To-day no free trade ports or wholly free ports of the type common to the period prior to the nineteenth century remain in continental Europe. In their place has come the free port or foreign trade zone, comprising a segregated area wherein the customs requirements applicable to the surrounding territory do not apply. The true free trade ports are now to be found principally in the colonial possessions of Great Britain. They are located not in the highly industrialized countries, but at the junctions of trade routes connecting the sources of important raw materials with the industrial nations utilizing these products, and in turn affording means for transshipping manufactured products from the great ocean liners to the small coasting and inland vessels reaching local distributing points.

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Foreign trade zones (or free ports)

Monograph

Chapter

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

Chapter

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation