metadata: authors: 0: author: Kee,Hiau Looi
1: author: Neagu, Cristina
2: author: Nicita,Alessandro
count: World
docna: 0: docna: Is protectionism on the rise ? assessing
            national trade policies during the crisis of 2008
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
subtopic: Construction Industry,Common Carriers Industry,Food & Beverage Industry,General Manufacturing,Pulp & Paper Industry,Plastics & Rubber Industry,Trade Policy,International Trade and Trade Rules,Rules of Origin,Food Security,Business Cycles and Stabilization Policies,Trade and Multilateral Issues
teratopic: Law and Development,Macroeconomics and Economic Growth,International Economics and Trade
abstracts: cdata!: To understand the role of trade policies
            in the crisis of 2008, this paper constructs the overall
            trade restrictiveness indices for a wide range of countries
            using their tariff schedules in 2008 and 2009. The index
            summarizes the trade policy stance of a country, taking into
            account the share of each good in trade as well as its
            corresponding import demand elasticity. Results show that
            there is no widespread increase in protectionism via tariff
            policies since the global financial crisis has unfolded.
            While many countries have adjusted tariffs upward on
            selected products, only a handful of countries, such as
            Malawi, Russia, Argentina, Turkey and China focus on
            products that have significant impacts on trade flows. The
            United States and the European Union, by contrast, rely
            mainly on anti-dumping duties to shield domestic industries.
            Overall, while the rise in tariffs and anti-dumping duties
            in these countries may have jointly caused global trade to
            drop by as much as US$43 billion during the crisis period,
            it explains less than 2 percent of the collapse in world trade.
repnme: repnme: Is protectionism on the rise ? assessing
            national trade policies during the crisis of 2008
display_title: Is protectionism on the rise
            assessing national trade policies during the crisis of 2008
listing_relative_url: /research/2010/04/12116560/protectionism-rise-assessing-national-trade-policies-during-crisis-2008
topicv3: Agriculture and Food Security m1326205 435,Manufacturing Sectors m1326521 1281,Trade m1326924 698,Trade Policy and Integration m1327407 775,Trade Policy m1327640 776
publishtoextweb_dt: 2010-07-01T00:00:00Z
historic_topic: Law and Development,Macroeconomics and Economic Growth,International Economics and Trade
no_of_pages: 34
author_keys: 0: author_key: 559677
1: author_key: 437023
model_extractions: WPS5274 Policy Research Working Paper 5274 Is Protectionism on the Rise?

Assessing National Trade Policies during the Crisis of 2008 _Hiau Looi Kee Cristina Neagu Alessandro Nicita_ The World Bank Development Research Group Trade and Integration Team April 2010
Policy Research Working Paper 5274

# **Abstract**

To understand the role of trade policies in the crisis of 2008, this paper constructs the overall trade restrictiveness indices for a wide range of countries using their tariff schedules in 2008 and 2009. The index summarizes the trade policy stance of a country, taking into account the share of each good in trade as well as its corresponding import demand elasticity. Results show that there is no widespread increase in protectionism via tariff policies since the global financial crisis has unfolded. While many countries have adjusted tariffs upward on selected products, only a handful of countries, such as Malawi, Russia, Argentina, Turkey and China focus on products that have significant impacts on trade flows. The United States and the European Union, by contrast, rely mainly on anti-dumping duties to shield domestic industries. Overall, while the rise in tariffs and anti-dumping duties in these countries may have jointly caused global trade to drop by as much as US$43 billion during the crisis period, it explains less than 2 percent of the collapse in world trade.

This paper—a product of the Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group—is part of a larger effort in the department to study the trade impact of the global crisis in 2008. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at hlkee@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
# Is Protectionism on the Rise? Assessing National Trade Policies during the Crisis of 2008<sup>�</sup>

Hiau Looi Kee<sup>y</sup> Cristina Neagu<sup>z</sup> Alessandro Nicita<sup>x</sup>

> �We are extremely thankful to Chad Bown for sharing his data on antidumping duties and all the stimulating discussions and comments. We also thank Ann Harrison for feedback on a previous draft. Feedback from Daniel Lederman, Caglar Ozden and participants of World Bank DECRG Crisis Worksop in Jan 2010 is acknowledged. The ...ndings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of ours, and do not necessarily re‡ect the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.

> yDevelopment Research Group, The World Bank, Washington, DC 20433, USA; Tel. (1-202) 473-4155; Fax: (1-202) 522-1159; e-mail: hlkee@worldbank.org

> zDevelopment Research Group, The World Bank, Washington DC, 20433, USA; Tel. (1-202) 458-8499; Fax: (1-202) 522-1159; e-mail: ineagu@worldbank.org

> xUNCTAD; e-mail: Alessandro.Nicita@unctad.org
# 1 Introduction

With the dramatic collapse of world trade in the wake of the biggest global recession in recent history, many have feared that governments may respond by increasing tari¤s and other trade policy barriers to protect the domestic economies, which may indirectly prolong the recession and lead to domestic unrest. In fact, in December 2008, among the ...rst crisis related demonstrations erupted in several cities in Russia over the increase in car tari¤s (see Dec 22, 2008, New York Times). Has protectionism been rising since fall 2008? To answer this question, we compare the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Indices (OTRI) of a wide range of countries in 2008 and 2009. The OTRI summarizes the trade policy stance of a country by calculating the uniform tari¤ that will keep its overall imports at the current level when the country in fact has di¤erent tari¤s for di¤erent goods. Unlike the trade weighted average tari¤s, the OTRI takes into account the importance of each good in total imports, as well as the responsiveness of the import of each good with respect to tari¤. Thus, not only are the weights proportionate to the import value of the goods, but goods that have a larger fall in imports when tari¤s are imposed, i.e. those goods that are highly elastic in demand, are also given larger weights. The empirical methodology of the OTRI was ...rst developed in Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2008, 2009), based on the theoretical underpinning of Anderson and Neary (1994, 1996, 2003). Irwin (forthcoming) also uses a similar methodology to study the historic protection level of the US, from 1867 to 1961.

Many recent papers have studied the trade impact of the global crisis in 2008 (see edited volumes by Baldwin and Evenett, 2009, and Baldwin, 2009). While consensus has yet to emerge among researchers, the two leading explanations provided so far are the role of international supply chain (Yi, 2009) and the lack of trade credits and ...nance during the crisis period (Amiti and Weinstein,
2009). Trade policy as a protectionist device has not been seen to play a big role in the global collapse of trade, neither as a cause nor a consequence. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that some countries are actively tinkering with their trade policies. For example, during the crisis period, Bolivia and Ecuador are shown to have altered their tari¤s on a large share of their imported products (Gamberoni and Newfarmer, 2009), while India is documented to have increased its use of anti-dumping (AD) duties (Bown, 2009b). How important are those changes in explaining or prolonging the collapse in world trade? The objective of this paper is thus to carefully compare the trade policies of a wide range of countries over the crisis period, and to assess by how much trade may have fallen due to the increase in tari¤s and AD duties of these countries. To be clear, for the purpose of this paper, we narrowly de...ne trade policies to only include tari¤s and AD duties.

To achieve our objective, we obtained the Most Favored Nations (MFN) applied tari¤ schedules and the bilateral tari¤ schedules for a wide range of countries in 2008 and 2009.<sup>1</sup> The MFN applied tari¤s tend to over-estimate the level of protection because they do not account for the existence of bilateral or regional tari¤ preferences. Hence, it is important for us to construct the OTRI based on the bilateral tari¤ schedules. This signi...cantly complicates the calculation of the OTRI as each country may have up to 200 trading partners and each bilateral tari¤ schedule consists of nearly 5000 HS 6 digit products. To spice up the tari¤ policies, we also merge the bilateral tari¤ schedules with the World Bank Global Anti-dumping Database, maintained by Chad Bown (2009a).<sup>2</sup> Thus, changes in the OTRI re‡ect both the changes in tari¤s and AD duties during the crisis period.

In addition, we need bilateral import demand elasticities and bilateral trade ‡ow data to prop-

> 1 We are extremely grateful to Mr. Mimouni Mondher from the International Trade Center in Geneva for kindly sharing the data with us, and to Richard Newfarmer and Elisa Gamberoni for facilitating the request.

> 2 We are highly indebted to Chad Bown for his suggestion to include the AD data in our calculations. He also graciously shared the latest data with us for this project.

2
erly weigh these bilateral tari¤s. We modify the multilateral import demand elasticity estimates in Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2008) to obtain the bilateral import demand elasticities. Bilateral trade ‡ow data are from Comtrade. Finally, to make sure that changes in the OTRI during the crisis period purely capture changes in trade policies, we use the 2008 bilateral trade ‡ows and elasticities as ...xed weights. As such, changes in trade or elasticity due to demand shocks will not a¤ect our OTRI measures.

Combing through the MFN and bilateral tari¤ schedules of all countries in our dataset, we found that, overall, there is no widespread increase in tari¤s. While there are many countries that have increased tari¤s on imported products, when we factor in the share of these products in trade as well as the responsiveness of these products to tari¤ changes, the overall impact on trade ‡ows is minimal for most countries. However, for a handful of countries, tari¤ increases on big imported items in both agriculture and manufacturing pushed up their OTRI and signi...cantly hinder trade. Russia, Malawi and Argentina all increased tari¤s on manufacturing products which caused their OTRI to increase by 0.9 to 1.2 percentage points and their trade ‡ows to drop by US$4.8 billion, US$29 million and US$914 million, respectively. Turkey on the other hand increased tari¤ on a wide range of agricultural products which raised its OTRI by 0.8 percentage points and caused its trade ‡ow to decrease by US$2.2 billion. With the removal of a temporary tari¤ reduction on palm oil and the introduction of some anti-dumping duties, India had a large increase in the level of protectionism in agriculture products (8.3 percentage points), even though this was o¤set by tari¤ liberalization in the manufacturing sector such that the OTRI of India only increased by 0.1 percentage points. Other countries that had large drops in trade due to increase in tari¤s include China (US$5 billion), Canada (US$1.8 billion) and Brazil (US$991 million). Finally, for the US and the EU, while the tari¤ schedules remained roughly the same throughout the crisis period, spikes 3
in anti-dumping duties caused their OTRI to increase by 0.5 percentage points and 0.1 percentage points respectively. Jointly, if we add up all the decrease in trade for all countries during the crisis period due to changes in tari¤s and anti-dumping duties, in the worst case scenario, the total decrease in imports is about US$43 billion, which is less than half a percent of world’s imports in 2008. According to the latest estimate of the World Trade Organization (WTO, 2010), world’s import decreased by 24% from its 2008 level during the crisis period. Thus, trade policies at most can explain about 2 percent of the sharp drop in world trade during the crisis period, suggesting that protectionism is not the main culprit behind the collapse of world trade and the collapse of world trade did not cause protectionism to increase.

As noted before that several smaller countries, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, have adjusted a wide range of their tari¤s during the crisis period. For example, Bolivia increased tari¤s on 31% of the HS6 digit imported products while simultaneously decreased tari¤s on 12% of other imported products. Likewise, Ecuador raised tari¤s on 15% of its imported products and lowered tari¤s on 27% of them. However, once import shares and their import demand elasticities are taken into account, we ...nd that, in both countries, there is no substantial increase in their OTRIs between 2008 and 2009. To what extent these tari¤s adjustments are a response to the crisis is not obvious. It is however clear that the overall level of tari¤ protection for these countries did not change markedly. This indicates that it is important to take into account both the relative value of the good in the import basket as well as its demand response to change in the tari¤s when calculating average measures.

This paper is organized as the following. We will ...rst brie‡y discuss the methodology behind the OTRI calculation in Section 2. Section 3 presents the data coverage. Section 4 shows the results and Section 5 concludes.

4
# 2 Change in the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Index

The Overall Trade Restrictiveness Index (OTRI) summarizes the impact of each country’s trade policies on its aggregate imports. Its conceptual framework was ...rst proposed in Anderson and Neary (1994, 1996, 2003), it was simpli...ed in Feenstra (1995) and was empirically estimated in Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2008, 2009). It answers the following question: What is the uniform tari¤ that if imposed on home imports instead of the existing structure of protection would leave aggregate imports at their current level? In a partial equilibrium, when we ignore the substitution between products and the potential income e¤ect due to tari¤ revenue redistribution, the OTRI is just a more sophisticated way to calculate the weighted average tari¤ of a country, with the weight of a good set equal to the product of the good’s import demand elasticity and its share in total import. Irwin (2009) also applies the same approach to study the historic level of protection of the US.

More formally, the OTRI of a country c, OTRIc; is implicitly de...ned by: where mn;c is the import value of good n in country c, tn;c is the ad-valorem tari¤ on good n in country c, and m<sup>0</sup> c<sup>representsthecurrentaggregateimportsevaluatedatworldprices(unitsare</sup> chosen so that all world prices equal unity). Totally di¤erentiating (1) in a partial equilibrium setup, and solving for OTRIc yields: 5
where "n;c is the import demand elasticity of good n in country c. Thus, for a given year, the OTRI of a country depends on the current year import ‡ow and tari¤ of the goods and the corresponding import demand elasticity.

When comparing the OTRI of a country across two years using (2), we would keep the trade ‡ow data and elasticity estimates constant (at base year), so that changes in the OTRI within the country across two years are purely driven by policy changes and not due to changes in trade ‡ows associated with shifts in preference or income. In the current context, we use the trade ‡ow information in 2008 to construct the OTRI of the countries in 2009: In this way, the di¤erence in the OTRI of a country between 2008 and 2009 only captures trade policy changes, and does not re‡ect the collapse of trade during the crisis period.

As shown in Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2009), the OTRI can be further decomposed into the import weighted average tari¤, t<sup>�</sup> c, and the covariance between the tari¤ and the import demand elasticity, cov (tn;c; ~"n;c): with ~"n;c denotes the elasticity of good n in country c rescaled by the import-weighted elasticity across all goods in country c. The higher the import weighted average tari¤ or the covariance between the tari¤and the import demand elasticity, the higher the OTRI. Thus, the OTRI increases if a country levies higher tari¤ on goods that have a larger import, and if the goods are very responsive to tari¤ changes.

In our empirical exercise below, we present the OTRI estimates of countries, and decompose 6
the OTRI into the import weighted tari¤ and the import weighted covariance between tari¤ and elasticity. This will help us understand why certain countries have large adjustment in their tari¤ schedule, but the OTRI remains relatively constant between 2008 and 2009.

While the trade policy of a country could consist of di¤erent tari¤ policies and other non-tari¤ measures, here, due to data limitations, we mainly focus on tari¤s. However, unlike the earlier papers, we utilize the bilateral tari¤s between country pairs at the HS 6 digit good level in our calculation of the OTRI. Moreover, we also employ the bilateral import demand elasticity at the same level of aggregation as the tari¤s. Finally, when possible, we include any anti-dumping duties that were imposed during the crisis period.<sup>3</sup> Once the change in the OTRI during crisis period of a country is calculated, some back-of-anenvelope calculations can be done to ...gure out the impact on trade ‡ows. One way is to use the change in the OTRI multiplied by the trade weighted import demand elasticities of the country. For ease of description, consider index n, as the HS 6 digit good from a bilateral partner country. Then This methodology does not restrict the changes in trade for an individual product and partner country. An alternative approach would be to calculate the change in tari¤ at the tari¤ line level

> 3 For the purpose of this paper, we also calculated bilateral import demand elasticities, which vary across countries, products and partners. For each product n imported by country c from partner country p, we rely on the following formula and on estimates of the GDP function parameter, ann, from Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2008) to construct bilateral import demand elasticities, where snc is the share of trade in product n in the GDP of country c in 2008 and sncp is the share of trade in product n from partner country p in the GDP of country c in 2008:

> "ncp =<sup>ann</sup> snc<sup>+ sncp �1</sup>

7
for each product from each partner country, multiply that by the bilateral import demand elasticity to obtain the change in trade at tari¤ line level and constrain the fall in trade to be no more than the level of imports in 2008. Summing all changes in trade at the tari¤ line level across all partners gives us the total change in trade, change in trade using tari¤s = Xn<sup>max [mn;c;2008"n;c;2008 (tn;c;2009 �tn;c;2008) ; �mn;c;2008] :</sup> (5)

# 3 Data

We obtained both the MFN tari¤ and bilateral tari¤ data for 135 countries from the International Trade Center (ITC) in Geneva. For India, Japan and South Korea we supplemented the ITC data with MFN schedules from other sources.<sup>4</sup> Table 1 presents some summary statistics of these schedules. In terms of the MFN tari¤s, the countries that have the highest simple average tari¤ in 2009 are Sudan (20.5%) and Morocco (20.2%). However, once we factor in the presence of preferential tari¤s in most bilateral trade, the average tari¤s in 2009 are lower.<sup>5</sup> Countries that have the highest average bilateral tari¤s in 2009 are Maldives (20.2%), Gambia (18.7%) and Sudan (18.5%).

Between 2008 and 2009, many countries actively adjusted their tari¤ policies. Countries that have had the largest percentage of tari¤ lines with increased tari¤s during the two-year period are

> 4 India’s 2008 and 2009 MFN schedule as well as Japan’s 2008 MFN schedule come from TRAINS. Japan’s 2009 MFN schedule was obtained from <http://www.customs.go.jp/english/tari¤/2010/index.htm>. South Korea’s 2009 MFN schedule comes from <http://english.custom s.go.kr/kcsweb/user.tdf ?a= user.customtari¤.Custom Tari¤App& c= 1001& m c= ENG LISH_ INFO RM ATIO N_ KO REA >. For these three countries, we lacked ad-valorem equivalents of 2009 speci...c tari¤s, hence we used the 2008 values.

> 5 The simple averages bilateral tari¤s for most countries are less than those of the MFN tari¤s, because of the presence of preferential tari¤s in most bilateral or regional trade agreements. However, given that the MFN data we obtained from the ITC are in tari¤ line level, which for some countries are HS 8 or HS 10 digit level, while the bilateral tari¤ data are in HS 6 digit level, the average MFN tari¤ may appear lower than the bilateral tari¤s.

8
Bolivia, Fiji and Ecuador. In 2009, Bolivia went through a huge adjustment in its tari¤ policy. It increased tari¤s on 27 percent of its MFN tari¤ lines and on 30 percent of its bilateral tari¤ lines while concurrently decreasing tari¤s on about 11% of its tari¤ lines. The net result was a jump in average bilateral tari¤ from 8% to 10%. Fiji and Ecuador each increased close to 15 percent of their bilateral tari¤ lines.<sup>6</sup> Other leading countries in terms of the percentage of tari¤ lines that have increased tari¤s are Argentina (9.6% of bilateral tari¤ lines), Belarus (7.6%), Mexico (6.6%), Brazil (5.6%), China (4.2%) and Malawi (4.2%).

On the other hand, many countries went through tari¤ liberalization from 2008 to 2009. Countries that have the largest percentage of tari¤ lines with lower tari¤s in 2009 are Costa Rica, Morocco and Mexico. Costa Rica reduced tari¤s in 98 percent of its bilateral tari¤ line products, which led to a drop in the average tari¤ from 6.3 percent to 5.2 percent. Similarly, Morocco and Mexico liberalized 40 to 60 percent of their bilateral tari¤ line products. Other leading countries in terms of the percentage of tari¤ lines that have decreased tari¤s are Ecuador (27%), Switzerland (23%), Ukraine (20%), and Australia (15%). Thus, it is not too surprising that we do not ...nd a widespread increase in protectionism during the crisis period, given that most countries in fact went through tari¤ reduction.

Data from anti-dumping duties are retrieved from the publicly available Global Anti-dumping Database of the World Bank, which is maintained by Chad Bown (2009a). The dataset provides detailed information on the anti-dumping cases by the initiating countries. While data can be traced back as far as the early 1990s, given that our focus is the changes during the 2008-2009

> 6 For Ecuador, ITC data only re‡ect changes up to December 2008. However, in January 2009, due to a balance-ofpayment crisis, Ecuador increased tari¤ on 5% of tari¤ lines (including both ad valorem and speci...c tari¤ additions), and imposed quota on 3.7% of its tari¤ lines. This set of trade measures a¤ects 23% of its imports (WTO, 2009). We complemented our ITC data with information on 75 subheadings for which there were increases in ad valorem tari¤s as a result of the January 2009 measure. Data were obtained from COMEXI Resolution No. 466, of 19 January 2009 published in O¢ cial Journal No. 512 and COMEXI Resolution No. 468 of 30 January 2009.

9
period, we only use those cases that are initiated in and after June 2008 until September 2009, net of anti-dumping duties that were removed during the same period. In other words, we only measure the change in anti-dumping duties during the two-year period, and we are not capturing the level of anti-dumping for each of the two years. This is an important point, because many anti-dumping duties in 2008 and 2009 are due to cases ...led in the 1990s. As long as these duties were not removed from the second quarter of 2008 onward, they do not a¤ect the change in level of protectionism. Only those new cases and the removal of old duties are factored in the calculations.

Table 2 presents some summary statistics on the countries that have added anti-dumping duties since the second quarter of 2008.<sup>7</sup> For the most part, changes in anti-dumping duties only a¤ect less than 1% of imports, ranging from US$8.5 billion in the EU to US$350 thousand in Chile. Nevertheless, given that some countries cannot unilaterally increase their tari¤s without violating WTO agreements, AD may well be one of those few legitimate channels to increase trade protection during the crisis period.

# 4 Results

Table 3 presents the OTRIs and their changes from 2008 to 2009. Four sets of results are presented for each country. First, is the calculation of the OTRI of each country based on its MFN tari¤s (OTRI_M). Next, is the calculation of the OTRI based on bilateral tari¤s of each country with its trading partners. Here we have two versions –one uses import demand elasticities directly from Kee, Nicita and Olarreaga (2008) that are country and product speci...c, but common across trad-

> 7 In addition to the 13 countries listed in Table 2, Global Anti-dumping database also have information for 5 more countries of the 135 present in our dataset: Pakistan is not included because we have no data on its 2009 tari¤ schedules; we also have no trade ‡ow data for South Korea and South Africa at tari¤ line level; we fail to match the AD data with trade data for Indonesia and Peru due to tari¤ reclassi...cation.

10
ing partners, OTRI_B. The other one uses bilateral elasticities with bilateral tari¤s, OTRI_BE. Finally, we incorporate AD duties into OTRI_BE to obtain OTRI_AD. Hence, the change in OTRI_AD within a country across two years re‡ects changes in tari¤s and AD duties jointly.

Comparing OTRI_M to OTRI_B, it is clear that using MFN tari¤s tends to overestimate the level of protection of a country. This is because most bilateral tari¤s include tari¤ preferences which cause OTRI_B to be less than OTRI_M. At the sample mean, OTRI_M is larger than OTRI_B by 75 percent. Figure 1 presents the scatter plot of OTRI_M and OTRI_B against the 45 degree line. Most countries locate above the 45 degree line indicating that their OTRI_M is larger than OTRI_B.

On the other hand, allowing for bilateral import demand elasticities marginally increases the overall level of protection, as bilateral elasticities tend to be larger than multilateral elasticities that are common across all trading partners within an imported product. At the sample mean OTRI_BE is larger than OTRI_B by 2 percent. Figure 2 presents the scatter plot of OTRI_BE and OTRI_B against the 45 degree line. Here there are about the same number of countries that are above the 45 degree line as there are below the 45 degree line.

Comparing OTRI_BE in 2008 to that of 2009, holding constant trade ‡ows and bilateral import demand elasticities, gives us the change in the level of tari¤ protection of a country during the crisis period. As shown in Figure 3, most countries are located above the 45 degree line, indicating that OTRI_BE in 2009 is less than OTRI_BE in 2008. However there are quite a few exceptions, notably Malawi, Russia, Turkey, China, Argentina, Canada, and Brazil. These countries are labeled in Figure 3. For Malawi, its OTRI_BE in 2008 is 7.1%, while in 2009 is 8.3%, which implies an increase of 1.2 percentage points. Likewise, Russia increases its OTRI from 9.6% to 10.8%. Turkey also increases its tari¤s in mainly agriculture products, which pushes up its OTRI from 2% to 2.7%.

11
China, Argentina and Canada each increases its OTRI by 0.3 percentage points. Such increases in the overall level of tari¤ protection could signi...cantly disrupt trade if imports are elastic. Back of an envelope calculations suggest that, once we take into account the import demand elasticities of these countries, increases in OTRI_BE in Malawi, Russia and Turkey jointly may have led imports to drop by US$6.7 billion. The trade impact of Canada, China and Argentina is even larger, close to US$7 billion.

Countries that do not raise their MFN or bilateral tari¤s are not necessarily less protectionist. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that during the crisis period, countries such as the USA, the EU and India actively levied AD duties on their partners to protect domestic producers. Based on data from the Global Anti-dumping Database, we calculate the change in OTRI_AD for a group of 13 countries where data are available. Given that AD duties are imposed at the tari¤ line level, which for many countries is at the 8 or 10 digit HS level, we ...rst need to identify the share of these goods in each HS 6 category in the bilateral trade of each of the 13 countries, and only impose AD duties on the goods a¤ected. In doing so, we avoid imposing AD duties on all HS 8 goods within the HS 6 categories, even though we are still making the assumption that AD duties a¤ect all bilateral trade within HS 8 goods and are not distinguishable among di¤erent ...rms that export. For some countries, such as Turkey and India, only a portion of AD cases have information on the actual AD duties imposed (see Table 2 last column). For the missing AD duties, we use our bilateral import demand elasticity estimates to infer the minimum prohibitive AD duties.

Figure 4 compares OTRI_BE in 2008 to OTRI_AD in 2009, where OTRI_AD is OTRI_BE with AD included. For the most part, adding AD does not change the results in Figure 3. However, for selected economies, the di¤erences are signi...cant. Incorporating AD duties during the crisis period increases the OTRI_BE of the US by half a percentage point. This seemingly small number 12
in fact prompted trade to decrease by US$24 billion, if we allow AD to a¤ect more than the existing level of pre-AD trade (see (4)), or by US$3 billion if we assume the maximum e¤ect of AD and other tari¤ increase cannot exceed the existing trade in 2008 (see (5)). Likewise, for the EU, incorporating AD duties causes its OTRI_BE to increase by 0.1 percentage points. As a result, imports of the EU drop by US$2 billion. This exercise shows that while anti-dumping may not increase the overall level of protection by much, it is in fact the main instrument being used by the US and EU during the crisis period. Another heavy user of AD is India. Without AD duties, OTRI_M of India decreases by 0.2 percentage points from 2008 to 2009.<sup>8</sup> Once AD duties are included, the change becomes positive 0.1 percentage points, indicating that AD have made the overall level of trade restrictiveness of India worse. The net trade e¤ect of the changes in tari¤ and AD duties for India is about US$306 million.<sup>9</sup> Nevertheless, such duties hardly explain the huge collapse in trade, which further suggests that this global collapse in trade is probably not because countries are becoming more protectionist, but instead relates to factors such as demand shocks.

Figure 5 compares AD to traditional tari¤ policy. The vertical axis is the change in AD duties during 2008-2009 and the horizontal axis is the change in the OTRI due to both tari¤s and AD. The 45 degree line is also depicted in the ...gure. For the US, the change in the OTRI is entirely driven by AD duties changes, which position the US on the 45 degree line. In the case of other

> 8 For Chile, India and Japan we use OTRI_M instead of OTRI_BE to calculate OTRI_AD, since 2009 bilateral tari¤ schedules are not available.

> 9 Our estimated changes in trade in Table 3 are not directly compatible to Bown (2009b). For example, for the worse case scenarios, Bown’s estimates of the AD impact in the US, EU and India are US$7 billion, US$8 billion and US$4 billion, respectively. The di¤erences can be attributed to the following. First, our estimates are based on tari¤ line (HS 8 digit) data, rather than HS 6 digit data. In other words, within an HS 6 digit category, only those HS 8 digit goods that are a¤ected by AD are included in the calculation, while Bown’s estimates use HS 6 digit trade ‡ows. Second, we use 2008 trade value in our calculation while Bown’s estimates based on 2007 trade value. Third, our AD coverage is from June 2008 to September 2009, while Bown’s estimates are from the ...rst quarter of 2008 to the ...rst quarter of 2009. Forth, we take into account the bilateral import demand elasticities in the calculation of trade impact due to AD. Finally, we include tari¤s and AD in our calculation of trade changes, while Bown’s estimates only focus on AD. For the EU and India, the negative impacts on trade ‡ows due to AD are partially o¤set by their overall tari¤ reduction during the two year period.

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countries, such as India and the EU, the change in AD duties is larger than that of tari¤s and AD combined, given that they in fact liberalize their tari¤s during the crisis period.

To understand what is behind all these changes in trade policy, Table 4 presents the level and changes of OTRI_AD in manufacturing and agricultural sectors in those countries where OTRI_AD has increased. We also decompose OTRI_AD into the import weighted average tari¤ and the covariance between tari¤ and the import demand elasticity. The possible impacts on trade ‡ows are included in the last two columns. Within sector, countries are ranked according to their changes in OTRI_AD. It is evident that most of the changes in OTRI_AD are driven by big increases in the agricultural sector. For example, the removal of a temporary tari¤ reduction on palm oil and the introduction of some anti-dumping duties on agriculture products in 2009 lead for India to an increase in the level of protectionism in agriculture products of 8.3 percentage points. Likewise, Turkey increases tari¤s on a wide range of agricultural products, which pushes its OTRI_AD for agricultural goods from 21.2% to 31.4%. Such big increase is partly because the tari¤s on these agricultural products are now much higher (on average 28% in 2009 as opposed to 18% in 2008), and partly because these agricultural products have high import demand elasticities. Canada and Malawi also have large increases in their OTRI_AD on agricultural products. On the other hand, the overall increases in the OTRI_AD of Russia, Argentina and China are mainly driven by the manufacturing sector. The rise in car tari¤s of Russia and textile tari¤s of Argentina causes their sectoral and overall OTRI_AD to be higher.

Results from Table 4 also show that, jointly, if we sum up all the negative trade impacts due to increased tari¤s and AD duties, world’s imports may have decreased by as much as US$43 billion. In 2008, the value of world imports was about $11 trillion, this implies that the changes in trade policy may have decreased world’s imports by 0.4 percent. According to the latest estimate of the 14
WTO (WTO, 2010), world’s imports contracted 24 percent in 2009. Thus our results show that trade policy changes at most can explain less than 2 percent of the collapse in world’s import during crisis period.

# 5 Conclusion

The fear that countries may raise tari¤s to protect the domestic market in the wake of the largest global recession since the Great Depression has not materialized. Comparing the published 2008 and 2009 tari¤ schedules of a wide range of countries shows that only a handful of countries have raised their tari¤s in a signi...cant way. These countries include Russia, Malawi, Argentina, Turkey and China. The increase in motor vehicle tari¤s in Russia not only restricted imports, it also caused one of the ...rst reported crisis related demonstrations. For some other countries, such as the US and the EU, most of the policy actions during the crisis period are not about tari¤s but anti-dumping duties. Nevertheless, even after taking anti-dumping duties into account, evidence provided in this paper suggests that the trade impact due to trade policy changes during the crisis period is minimum, and can explain no more than 2 percent of the collapse in world trade.

There are a few reasons why countries have not, so far, used tari¤s as a policy instrument. First, the multitude of multilateral, regional and bilateral trade agreements impose limits on the use of traditional trade policy instruments such as tari¤s. Second, many countries may be more inclined to use non-tari¤ measures such as bail outs and local content requirement to discriminate against imports. Overall, there are as many as 50 countries that have bail outs or state assistance. Some countries, such as the US and China also include local content requirements in their stimulus packages which discriminate against imported products. Third, trade policy generally is a response 15