This paper empirically examines how standards and technical regulations affect export margins in three African countries at the firm level. The approach involves combining detailed customs transaction data at the firm-product level with bilateral information on non-tariff measures within a...

Higher levels of quota granted can induce and increase exports, but the impact is not the same across all tariff lines. Answers are sought to the question of how the level of exports changes as the quota size of tariff rate quotas changes, thus enabling the investigation of whether unilateral...

The European Union has implemented various trade policies in the textile and clothing sector, a major global employment generator, over the past three decades. This paper investigates how these evolving policies have impacted the four largest exporters of textiles and clothing to the EU. A...

Addressing climate change requires green technology deployment. This paper uses firm-level import data in 35 emerging markets to examine how trade policies affect firms’ imports of products associated with solar, wind power, and electric vehicle value chains. Panel estimates show a...

This paper examines how EU Technical Barriers to Trade (TBTs) reshape firms’ global supply chains, extending Grossman et al. (2024) to incorporate adaptation costs between sourcing partners. To test the model’s predictions, we construct a novel dataset linking EU TBTs to French firm-level...

Is the harmonization of different food standards between countries in the context of free trade agreements exclusively positive, or is there a risk of high social costs for consumers? The harmonization of different national regulations plays an important role in contemporary trade policy. In...

The Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement aims to ensure that regulations, standards, testing and certification procedures followed by WTO members do not create unnecessary obstacles to trade. Annual Review of TBT Agreement The WTO Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade collects data on an...

Technical measures, particularly Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures (SPS) and Technical barriers to trade (TBT) can affect to firms' market entry and the volume of trade. Yet, technical measures is ambiguous and complicated, especially for developing countries. Therefore, the study analyses the...

Objective The present article discusses changes in tariff and non-tariff restrictions applied in World Trade Organization (WTO) countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods The employed research tools were a review and analysis of literature along with source statistical data of WTO, UNCTAD,...

As WTO regulations limited tariffs, non-tariff barriers, such as import licenses (NAILs), became essential trade policy tools. This paper examines how NAILs impact downstream firms in Argentina. Using a novel dataset and the staggered introduction of NAILs between 2005-2011 for identification,...

The spread of Covid-19 has raised questions about the progress toward sustainable development goals. Many nations have seen a fast surge in non-tariff measures used to safeguard public health during the epidemic. Non-tariff measures, as the role of trade policy instruments, can reflect the...

Structural quantitative work in international economics typically models trade costs as a log-linear function of exogenous trade-policy variables. We propose a structural approach that allows for a nonparametric relationship and for treating tariff and nontariff trade-policy variables as...

Even though trade negotiations have increasingly come to focus on regulatory issues, the full impacts, that is, both social costs and benefits of regulatory changes, often remain unexamined in trade impact assessments. To bridge this gap, we scrutinize the theoretical foundations, methodologies...

Can consumers trust that the food they buy in the supermarket, even if imported, is not harmful to their health? What would be the consequences if their trust in existing health and safety standards were to be undermined by recognizing lower foreign standards? Against the backdrop of public...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly dealing with challenges shaped by the new geopolitical and trade environments. Besides traditional tariffs, exporting firms need to comply with regulatory non-tariff measures (NTMs) in the form of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) and sanitary...

This paper analyses how regulatory convergence in different categories of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) imposed on imports of goods in information and communications technology (ICT) globally affected the values, volumes, and unit values of imported goods during the period 1996-2019....