# **1 Introduction**

Several rounds of trade negotiations and reforms have reduced tariffs globally to historically low levels (Baldwin, 2016), even more so for developing countries, including those in Africa, which often benefit from unilateral and bilateral trade preferences. Nevertheless, alongside these tariff reductions, there has been a notable surge in the adoption, scope, and application of non-tariff measures (NTMs) to regulate trade (WTO, 2012; Niu et al., 2020). NTMs encompass a broad range of regulatory and administrative measures, which are not tariffs but can affect trade flows. These include product standards, licensing requirements, customs procedures, and technical regulations (Staiger, 2019). As the GDP per capita rises, the relative contribution of NTMs in determining overall protection levels increases (WTO, 2012). In developed countries, about 70% of imports are typically subjected to NTMs, but approximately 40% in developing countries (UNCTAD and World Bank, 2018). As a result, in numerous high-income destinations, the success of exports from developing countries is more likely contingent upon compliance with NTMs.

The rapid proliferation of NTMs has sparked considerable interest in the trade literature (see e.g., Li and Beghin, 2012; Ronen, 2017). Their impact on trade is, however, ambiguous because they have the potential to influence both the demand and supply of the products that they affect. On one hand, they can signal quality and safety to consumers, thereby affecting demand. On the other hand, they might raise costs for exporters of the products they impact, affecting the supply side. In the end, their trade effects depend on the relative magnitude of their demand enhancing and trade cost effects. As a consequence, the findings from the existing literature are mixed. In addition, despite the increasing utilization of NTMs, the literature on their impact on exporters in developing countries is limited (Grundke and Moser, 2019).

In this study, we examine the impact of NTMs, specifically standards and technical regulations, on exports from Africa. To do so, we combine dis-aggregated firm-product level customs transactions panel data in three African countries (i.e., Burkina Faso, Malawi, and Senegal) and panel data on NTMs within a reduced-form gravity model. Of the different NTM types, we focus on standards and technical regulations, which are mainly sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade (TBT) measures.<sup>1</sup> While they are _prima facie_ introduced to address market imperfections such as genuine health and safety concerns, they can also disguise protectionist intents including protecting domestic producers from foreign competition. For instance, the introduction of standards and technical regulations could increase both fixed (e.g. costs related to efforts devoted by firms to show compliance with the standards) and variable (e.g. costs related to substituting low-quality intermediate inputs with high-quality ones) trade costs (Ing et al., 2016; De Melo and Shepherd, 2018). In addition, standards and technical regulations could enhance trade by reducing information asymmetry between producers and consumers in terms of product safety and other product

> 1NTMs can be either technical or non-technical. Non-technical measures are only applied at the border (e.g., quantitative restrictions, import licenses, competition measures) and thus only affect third-country producers. Given their discriminatory nature, the trade effects of border NTMs are often obvious, e.g., import (export) bans will reduce imports (exports). The technical measures are behind-the-border measures that affect both domestic and foreign producers. These are mainly dominated by SPS and TBT measures.

1