North Macedonia’s Foreign Minister Timco Mucunski and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, May 2025. Photo: mfa.gov.mk
The United States and North Macedonia have agreed a framework for an agreement on reciprocal Trade, which Skopje hopes will ease the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the Balkan state.
“We are strengthening the bilateral economic cooperation and opening greater access to the US market for Macedonian companies,” North Macedonia’s Foreign Minister, Timco Mucunski, posted on Facebook on Friday.
The agreed framework, as announced by the Office of the US Trade Representative, stipulates that North Macedonia will remove tariffs on US industrial and agricultural goods and will work to prevent barriers to future digital trade with the US.
Crucially, however, the US will keep its 15-per-cent tariffs on goods from North Macedonia, which Trump’s executive order introduced last April.
But the new framework opens the possibility that the US can remove reciprocal tariffs on “certain qualifying exports” from North Macedonia “that cannot be grown, mined, or naturally produced in the United States in sufficient quantities”.
On Thursday, while hinting at “good news from the US”, North Macedonia’s Prime Minister laid out what his country is hoping to achieve.
Hristijan Mickoski said that more than 60 products from North Macedonia that the country sees as strategic exports could be fully exempt from tariffs, or get preferential treatment, with tariffs of no more than 6.5 per cent. Some of these include clothing, tobacco, certain types of food, steel and iron, as well as parts for the car industry.
In April 2025, when Trump presented his reciprocal tariffs, North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia were among the Balkan countries worst hit. Initially, the US imposed a 33-per-cent tariff on North Macedonia, but after North Macedonia announced a plan to fully cut tariffs on US imports, to gain Trump’s favour, this was reduced to 15 per cent.
The fresh Framework puts additional emphasis on energy. North Macedonia renewed its commitment to build a gas inter-connector pipeline with neighbouring Greece and buy US LNG through it.
Trade between the two countries is relatively modest. Last year, the US was ranked as North Macedonia’s 18th biggest trade partner. The country’s top trade partners are countries in. the EU, to where it exports some 70 per cent of its goods, with Germany in the lead.
According to North Macedonia’s State Statistical Office, throughout 2025, the total trade volume between North Macedonia and the US was worth some $351 million, or 296 million euros, with a trade deficit of some $203 million, weighted heavily to the US side.
Major exports included buses, raw tobacco and insulated wire. The main imports from the US included computers, electric batteries and detonating fuses.