Reassessing Effective Protection Rates in a Trade in Tasks Perspective : Evolution of Trade Policy in 'Factory Asia'

With international trade moving from "trade in (final) goods" to "trade in tasks", effective protection rates (EPRs) are back to the stage. Input-output matrices are used in this paper to monitor the production structure of 10 Asian-Pacific countries between 1995 and 2005, and to calculate sectorial EPRs. The paper proposes a series of counter-factual simulation methods aimed at isolating the specific contribution of changes in tariff policies, in production structure or in real exchange rates. International input-output matrices allowed 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