WTO, (iii) the average tariff binding rate that the country committed not to exceed when joining the WTO, and (iv) the MFN tariff rate that the country applied to all other WTO members in 2013.

First, Table 3 indicates that even the poorest recently acceded countries have bound almost 100 percent of their tariffs at some level. As I will observe in Section 4.1, this is very different from many developing countries at similar levels of income per capita that joined the WTO upon its inception in 1995 or which had previously been a Contracting Party to the GATT 1947, and which did not similarly bind all of their products’ tariffs. (I investigate and address this issue for such countries separately below.) Second, for a number of recent WTO accession countries, they were not forced to make substantial cuts (on average) to their applied tariffs upon entry into the agreement. Indeed, for more than half of the 27 recently acceded WTO members listed in Table 3, their average binding commitment under the WTO is actually higher than the average tariff the country applied five years prior to WTO entry, meaning that the country could (on average) increase its applied tariffs upon entry into the WTO and still be in compliance with its obligations. Major exceptions include a number of large economies such China, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan (China), and Ukraine. However, a notable characteristic of all of the recently acceded WTO members is the relatively limited amount of average tariff overhang between binding rates and applied MFN tariffs in 2013. With the exception of Vanuatu (30.6 percentage points), no newly acceded member has an average level of tariff overhang exceeding 13.8 percent in 2013 (Nepal) - as Section 5.1 reveals, this is also substantially different from countries that acceded to the WTO upon its entry into force in 1995; i.e., there are 45 WTO members with more than 15 percentage points of average tariff overhang in 2013.

Figure 2 illustrates the industry-level variation for these tariff data summarized by Table 3. The three panels represent the average tariffs by sector for three groupings of countries - lowincome countries, lower-middle-income countries, and middle- and higher-income countries. For each sector, there are two sets of bars - the first set reflects the average tariffs for the recently acceded WTO members, and the second set reflects the average tariffs for the current WTO nonmembers. Finally, for WTO members, for each sector there are three pieces of information - the grey bar reflects the average MFN applied rate in 2013, the white bar reflects the tariff binding overhang (or water) above the current applied rate, and the black star reflects the average applied tariff that was in place five years _prior to_ the country’s WTO accession. For the WTO non-member countries, the black bar represents the average tariff in the sector that the countries in that income group applied in 2013.

First compare the black stars with the black bars - i.e., compare the average applied tariffs for the recent accession countries five years prior to their WTO membership with the average applied tariffs of the current non-members. Overall, Figure 2 suggests the patterns are quite similar (conditional on income group) across industries; on average at least, the “future” WTO accession countries currently apply import tariffs that are similar to the applied tariff starting point of the recent accession countries before they gained WTO entry. And while there is variation across sectors and 13