Summary: With international trade moving from "trade in (final) goods" to "trade in tasks", effective protection rates (EPRs) are back to the stage, allowing us to measure the overall protection of a product or sector by including the production structure and the origin of the inputs -domestic or Imported. Input-output matrices are used to monitor the production structure of 10 Asian-Pacific countries, and to calculate sectorial EPRs. A series of counter-factual simulation methods were aimed at isolating the specific contribution of changes in tariff policies, in production structure or in real exchange rates. international input output matrices allows, also to compute and compare the average propagation length of a cost-push linked to a sudden change in tariff duties, identifying those sectors that are the most deeply interconnected, both in the intensity and in the length of their inter-industrial foreign relationships.
Introduction:
Non Tariff Barriers:
Non Tariff barriers [NTBs] dominate the trade regimes of most developing countries. NTBs consist of all barriers to trade that are not tariffs. It is even more general than that, since the term is often used to include trade interventions such as export subsidies that serve to stimulate rather than retard trade and therefore are not barriers to trade at all. It also includes well-known trade distorting policies such as import quotas and voluntary export restraints. The measures range from narrowly conceived ones affecting particular products, industries and countries to more general ones that are rooted in national, institutions and policies. Thus it may be difficult to devise accurate quantification of many of these NTB measures. Some of the barriers may be formal and are explicitly stated in official and governmental mandates. It is important to mention that there is no single useful way of measuring the “size” of an NTB. NTBs require several parameters to characterize them fully. In this connection it...