Assessing Market Access: Do Developing Countries Really Get a Preferential Treatment?

This paper provides an assessment of the existing preferences on the products currently exported in a few key developed countries’ markets: EU, Japan and US. The analysis is undertaken drawing on the trade preferences database provided by the most recent version (release 6) of the GTAP database. This includes a presentation of the structure of tariff regimes in these key developed countries and identification of countries and sectors that are most reliant on tariff preferences. The paper computes theoretically consistent protection indexes using a comparative static applied general equilibrium model (Global Trade Analysis Project – GTAP) featuring imperfect competition. We construct bilateral indicators of protection focused on the applied tariffs faced by the exports of each country, using an index of trade policy restrictiveness, the Mercantilistic Trade Restrictiveness Index (MTRI), as the tariff aggregator. Our results provide a picture which is quite different from the one yielded by traditional indexes, such as the trade-weighted tariff average, or market access measures based on bound tariffs.