Production-weighted Estimates of Aggregate Protection in Rich Countries toward Developing Countries

David Roodman

No 66, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: A challenge in the development of aggregate indexes of trade protection is finding weights to put on various tariffs that a) reflect their importance to exporters and b) are not endogenous to the protection being measured. One common basis for weights is actual imports; but these, as is well-known, are endogenous. Various authors have worked to correct this endogeneity, but doing so is difficult in product areas where protection is both high and widespread. For this reason, I develop a new set of estimates of overall protection in rich countries with respect to developing ones that eschews import weights as much as possible in favor of weights based on the value of exporter’s total production in each product area. The results are generally much higher than those from the Bouët et al. (2004) “MAcMap” data set; there, weights are based on imports of large reference groups of countries. I conclude that product areas in which protection is high and widespread are systematically de-emphasized when using pure MAcMap weights to aggregate across major product groups. In particular, when gauging rich-country protection with respect to developing countries, agriculture is de-emphasized. I also develop estimates of trade-distorting subsidies by country and commodity and translate these into tariffequivalents with the methodology of Cline (2004) in order to estimate overall protection levels. Agricultural tariffs dominate subsidies in trade-distorting effect, and agricultural protection in turn dominates goods protection generally. Japan is most protective, largely because of rice tariffs near 900%, followed by Norway and Switzerland. Because of their greater reliance on agriculture, the poorest countries face higher trade barriers than wealthier developing countries, despite tariff preferences.

Keywords: Doha Round; measuring trade openness; agricultural subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 H25 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2005-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-int and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/3534

Related works:
Journal Article: Production‐weighted Estimates of Aggregate Protection in Rich Countries Towards Developing Countries (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:66

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().