# **1. Introduction**

One of the instruments many governments resorted to in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic was trade policy. Barriers to the importation of medical products and supplies and agricultural and food products were lowered, and restrictions imposed on exports of such goods. The mix of import facilitation and export controls was driven by the objective of maximizing the availability of critical supplies in the domestic market. Real-time tracking of the use of trade policy measures is difficult as governments only report changes in trade policy to the WTO with a lag and may not notify the WTO at all. Timely information on trade policy measures matters for businesses seeking to expand production and needing to source inputs to do so, to public authorities responsible for procuring critical supplies, and for policy analysts interested in assessing the effects and effectiveness of policy responses to the pandemic.

This paper introduces a new data set on trade policy interventions – both to control exports and facilitate imports of food, medical supplies, and personal protective equipment (PPE). The data set is the product of an ongoing open data initiative conducted by the Global Trade Alert (GTA) in partnership with the European University Institute and the World Bank to collect information on changes in trade policy towards exports and imports of medical and food products starting in January 2020.<sup>1</sup> Until midOctober 2020 the data were collected and reported on a weekly basis, providing the ability to track the imposition and removal of measures across a wide range of countries. The high frequency of the data is a unique feature of the exercise. The project is ongoing. The data used in this paper span the period from January 2, 2020 to October 9, 2020.

Our aim in this paper is to provide a descriptive assessment of the trade policy measures implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper and the accompanying database complement a growing body of policy oriented economic research studying international trade during the COVID-19 pandemic. Early in the pandemic many analysts and organizations stressed the importance of keeping borders open to allow supply chains to work efficiently in ramping up supply of critical products (e.g., Baldwin and Evenett, 2020; Bown, 2020a,b,c; Evenett, 2020; Espitia et al., 2020; Mattoo and Ruta, 2020; OECD, 2020; WTO, 2020). In practice, some countries did so; others did not. Understanding the drivers of the differences in observed trade policy responses over time and across countries and sectors is important for drawing inferences (and lessons) about the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for international cooperation and potential rule making looking forward. The data set allows empirical analysis of a range of research questions. Some of these are discussed briefly on the penultimate section of this paper, but we do not undertake such analyses here. Instead, our main aim is to raise awareness of the data set in the hope others will be encouraged to use it.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the data set and provides basic summary statistics. Section 3 highlights some stylized facts that emerge from the trade policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Section 4 discusses several hypotheses suggested by these stylized facts and possible research questions that could be the subject of further analysis. Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Data set**

The data collection initiative presented in this paper is confined to trade policy changes in two sectors: medical goods and medicines, and agricultural and food products. The products falling under each of

> 1 Information on trade policy changes is processed and collated by the Global Trade Alert team. The data are posted at https://www.globaltradealert.org/; https://globalgovernanceprogramme.eui.eu/covid-19-trade-policy-database-food-andmedical-products/ and https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/trade/brief/coronavirus-covid-19-trade-policy-database-foodand-medical-products.