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15 September 2016 By Una Galani Follow @ugalani

The U.S. will end sanctions and accept duty-free imports from the Asian nation. It is a milestone. A blacklist of companies and individuals had made it difficult and costly to deal with the country. Scrapping that makes Myanmar a lot less scary for foreign banks and other firms.

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President Barack Obama said on Sept. 14 that the United States was ready to lift sanctions on Myanmar. The announcement came on the same day that Obama met Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi was visiting the White House for the first time since her party won a landslide election victory last year. She said it was time for all sanctions that hurt her country economically to be lifted.

The United States will "revoke the Executive Order-based framework of the Burma sanctions program", the White House said in a statement, referring to the country by its previous name.

It will also terminate the "national emergency" status applied to Myanmar since 1997. That will end restrictions imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the State Department said in a separate factsheet. Several curbs will remain in place, including travel restrictions on certain military personnel.

The country will also reinstate Myanmar to the Generalized System of Preferences, which provides duty-free treatment for goods from poor and developing countries. The move will be effective Nov. 13. It will allow Myanmar to export about 5,000 products to the United States duty-free, a U.S. official told Reuters.

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