these sectoral headings are listed in the methodology note that accompanies the database.<sup>2</sup> Policy interventions by national and sub-national governments, as well as actions taken at the supra-national level by a customs union are included in the data collection exercise.

Trade policy measures are identified by the GTA team using the following methodology. First, automated techniques are used to gather information in multiple languages on relevant trade policy changes from many different sources including websites of relevant government agencies (which can include finance ministries, trade ministries, customs agencies, health ministries or associated agencies, and offices of the head of government or state); websites of relevant international organizations (IMF, ITC, UNCTAD, WCO, WTO); online media sources, including social media; and non-state organizations collecting information on the matters falling within the scope of this initiative, including law firms, consulting companies, research institutes and other academic initiatives.

These sources are searched for key words in major languages relating to the policies and products falling into the two sectors of interest. Such searches create “leads” which are processed to identify those that legitimately characterize a trade policy change falling within the scope of the initiative. Every lead recorded in the GTA’s systems is enriched in a multi-step analytical process. In the first step, an analyst provides an initial assessment of whether the lead is of topical relevance (within scope as defined in the last section), the implementing jurisdiction, the policy instrument category described, the product categories affected, and the direction of the trade policy change. This initial assessment is subsequently validated by a second analyst who confirms, amends, or rejects the first’s choices. Once past this initial assessment, relevant leads then move into the GTA reporting pipeline. Where missing in the first step, an official source is sought and, if found, saved for each lead. Once the official source has been located, the responsible GTA trade policy analyst processes the lead into a GTA database entry that combines a brief description of the state act along with identification of the most accurate policy instrument among a rich taxonomy plus the appropriate United Nations product and sectoral codes.<sup>3</sup> The final database on trade policy changes includes information on the sector affected (medical products and/or food); the type of information used to document the trade policy change (official source, report on the Global Trade Alert website, media sources, or consultancy or law firm reports); the jurisdiction implementing the trade policy change; an initial assessment whether the trade policy change is liberalizing or restrictive; where relevant/available the date the trade policy change was announced/was implemented and lapsed; and whether the trade policy change affects imports and/or exports.

The version of the data set used in this paper spans the period up to October 9, 2020. It includes 701 policy measures covering 135 customs territories (the European Union, the South African Custom Union, and the Eurasian Custom Union are considered as a single territory, independent from of their member states).<sup>4</sup> For the ensuing descriptive analysis of trade policy measures across countries and over time we consider the date of announcement as the starting date of each measure. We clean the data accordingly to remove inconsistencies in the reported measures. We also exclude measures with a 2019 announcement date, i.e., before the COVID-19 outbreak. This leaves 645 measures, of which 284 have no removal date indicated and 52 are to be removed in 2021 or later.

> 2 See https://globalgovernanceprogramme.eui.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Methodologynote050420.pdf.

> 3 For products this is the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS); for sectors the UN use is made of the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC).

> 4 In the case of the European Union, some member states also took individual actions to restrict or encourage trade in medical supplies. These countries included Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland and Romania. In the analysis that follows the scores attributed to individual members of a custom union are added to whatever measures are implemented by the union. That is, the EU and its member states are identified as distinct implementing jurisdictions. This permits identification of both the EU as an entity and individual EU countries in the scatterplots that follow, with data for member states comprising those measures implemented on top of the EU-level ones (which are identified by the label EU).

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