Since the fostering of trade liberalization in the 1990s, conventional trade barriers, such as tariffs, have been dropping steadily worldwide. Under the WTO regime, member countries are unable to impose higher tariff rates than the bound rates, and the effective tariff rates have been decreasing...

Since the advent of the GATT regime in the mid-1990s, declines in applied tariff rates and increases in non-tariff measures (NTMs) have been observed. The possibility of NTMs being deployed as protectionist measures in lieu of conventional tariffs has been studied in some literature, for example...