Estimating Trade Restrictiveness Indices

By H. Kee, Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga. 2006

1,122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree of trade distortions that each country imposes on itself through its own trade policies. The second one focuses on the trade distortions imposed by each country on its import bundle. The last index focuses on market access and summarizes the trade distortions imposed by the rest of the world on each country's export bundle. All indices are estimated for the broad aggregates of manufacturing and agriculture products. Results suggest that poor countries (and those with the highest poverty headcount) tend to be more restrictive, but they also face the highest trade barriers on their export bundle. This is partly explained by the fact that agriculture protection is generally larger than manufacturing protection. Nontariff barriers contribute more than 70 percent on average to world protection, underlying their importance for any study on trade protection.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93fb0cef7009a52d4b60fdbf28d03d2eb43443bb

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Citations in the corpus

Trade facilitation in ASEAN member countries: Measuring progress and assessing priorities (2008, methodology): “(Singapore can also be included in this group, since it has a zero applied tariff on almost all goods; it is not included in the Kee et al. (2006) sample.)”
Trade Costs in the Developing World: 1996–2010 (2015, positive): “The World Bank has produced a number of such measures, including tariff (TTRI) and non-tariff barriers (OTRI) (Kee et al., 2009).”
Trade, Production, and Protection Database, 1976–2004 (2007, methodology): “The methodology to obtain the averages of nontariff barriers is described in Kee, Nicita, and Olarreaga (2006).”
Why trade facilitation matters to Africa1 (2009, positive): “Kee et al. (2009) develop theoretically grounded indices based on research by Anderson and Neary (1994) of trade restrictiveness across countries.”
International Trade and Income Differences (2010, methodology): “The first is an accounting exercise analogous to standard income accounting procedures as in Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (1997) or Hall and Jones (1999).”
Trade and Investment under Policy Uncertainty: Theory and Firm Evidence (2015, positive): “Limão and Tovar (2011) employ the estimates in Kee et al. (2009) and note that the trade restrictiveness index for the typical country in the world is equivalent to a uniform”