. /.  WORLD TRADE  
ORGANIZATION  TN/MA/W/46/Add.12 
24 May 2005 
 (05-2090) 
Negotiating Group on Market Access  
  
 
NON -TARIFF BARRIER NOTIFICATIONS  
 
Addendum
 
 
 
 
I. EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES ...............................................................................................2  
 
   
 TN/MA/W/46/Add.12 
Page 2 I. EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES 
  
Maintaining 
participant Products affected by 
the barrier Nature of the barrier Trade effects of the barrier Inventory 
category Relevant 
WTO 
provision Treatment 
of the 
barrier 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
While transparency 
on the use of 
export taxes 
remains the 
exception despite 
existing notification 
procedures (e.g. 
Ministerial Decision 
on Notification 
Procedures from 
1993), information 
collected through 
various sources 
reveals that almost 
half of all countries 
in a sample of 103 WTO Members 
have some form of 
export taxes in 
place. Also, 12 
Members levy 
higher, or 
substantially 
higher, than 15 
percent taxes on 
exports, of which 
only one Member is 
an LDC.
 Generic 
(predominantly 
textiles, leather, skins 
and hides; minerals 
and metal products; 
as well as woods and 
forestry products).  Export taxes 
Through the levy of 
taxes or a specific duty, 
these measures serve 
in many instances the 
purpose of promoting 
higher value-added 
production in domestic 
industries. In some 
cases, export taxes 
appear to have replaced 
export restrictions, 
including bans, when 
the latter were not likely 
to be in compliance with 
relevant GATT Articles (XI, XX and XXI).  Besides being poor instruments from an efficiency and 
equity standpoint for the country imposing the measures, 
export taxes could distort international trade and reduce 
the benefits from trade of other WTO Members in four 
different ways:  
1. In the event that export taxes influence international 
market prices, which would only occur if the country 
imposing the tax is ‘large ’, the measures imply a 
transfer of wealth from importing countries to the 
exporting (taxing) country. 
2. By reducing domestic prices on the taxed products, 
the measures reduce profit ability and/or the amount 
of imports to the domestic processing industry in the 
country imposing the export taxes. 
3. By providing an indirect subsidy to domestic 
producers, the export taxes give the domestic processing industry a competitive advantage over 
foreign producers. 
4. By reducing the profitabilit y of exporting the products 
for which taxes have been imposed, or by setting the 
taxes sufficiently high that they become de facto bans 
on exports, the measures restrict access of inputs to 
processing industries in other countries.   
 
In many cases, developing countries’ processing 
industries and producers of the taxed goods (usually 
commodities) will by most severely hurt by the trade 
distortion created by other WTO Members’ export taxes. 
For example, this is considered to be one of the reasons 
behind Africa’s so-called leather gap. But also developed 
countries’ producers can expe rience significant negative 
effects, especially in the short to medium run. For 
example, the EU tanning indust ry estimated that in 2001 
the losses caused by merely one other WTO Member’s 
export measures were over € 35.5 million.  V-J Not covered 
by existing 
WTO Agreements a 
(Horizontal) 
 
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