It is well documented that retail prices in Japan are higher than in other countries for similar products. The two main competing explanations for this finding are: (1) a relatively high degree of discriminatory practices against imports, and (2) relatively high distribution costs associated...

A number of legislative frameworks and policies exercise various constraints on access to the Internet for certain goods, services, and other content. Some of these are recognized by most, if not all market participants as legitimate (data protection laws, measures to combat fraud, as well as...

In March 2018, the United States adopted measures to increase tariffs on a range of imported steel and aluminum products, claiming that the measures are justified for its national security concerns. Several WTO Members, including the European Union, India, Russia, Turkey, and China, have argued...

Antidumping has become the dominant instrument for temporarily restricting imports. There is need for concern, as it represents a particularly distorting trade policy measure. Many observers have made suggestions on how to improve the current situation. These suggestions aim at restraining...

International trade in goods requires service inputs such as transport, banking and financial services for production and transportation. Trade in goods and services are now closely linked and contribute to the growth of international trade. The goal of this study is to investigate the effects...

This chapter surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83% of the world's population and 91% of the world's GDP in 2013. We address five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading regimes than others? Within...

We provide a synthesis of the theoretical models that study the use of escape clauses, also known as safeguards, in multilateral and preferential trade agreements. We consider models that explain this type of flexibility based on economic efficiency, political economy shocks, and...

Using estimates of protection in the EU market against US exports, this paper illustrates the relative importance of natural and policy sources of protection and the measurement errors induced in the measurement of effective protection by omitting transactions costs. It also considers protection...

Existing tariff levels of many countries, and particularly of developing countries and on agriculture for most countries, still give plenty of scope for trade discrimination. For non-tariff barriers there is substantial scope for discrimination within and beyond the transitional arrangements of...

This paper presents a new measure of aggregate trade restrictions (MATR) using data from the International Monetary Fund's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions. MATR is strongly correlated with existing measures of trade restrictiveness but is more comprehensive in...