Publication

A challenge in the development of aggregate indexes of trade protection is finding weights to put on various tariffs that reflect their importance to exporters and are not endogenous to the protection being measured. The author develops 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 author also develops estimates of trade-distorting subsidies by country and commodity and translates these into tariff equivalents with the methodology of Cline in order to estimate overall protection levels.