Exports at Risk from Non-Tariff Measures: The Experience of Commonwealth Countries

In recent years, increases in far-reaching tariffs have been widely publicised. While these have been important, this paper demonstrates that larger shares of Commonwealth member countries' exports have been exposed to changes in other policies, undertaken by their trading partners, that have tilted the commercial playing field towards favoured, local firms. It combines three databases of commercial policy change over the past decade to compute the shares of Commonwealth exports at risk from adverse policy changes and reforms by trading partners. The calculations undertaken use the finest-grain trade data available globally, and the conservative methods employed suggest that the resulting estimates almost certainly understate the scale of the threat to living standards.