Economic research and trade policy analysis

The statistics related to applied tariffs and imports are calculated using data which are based on the HS nomenclature adopted by the country for the reference year. For statistics on bound tariffs, the calculations are based on the approved schedule of concessions of the WTO member. In previous issues of World Tariff Profiles, each schedule is based on the HS version which the member used when it acceded to the WTO. Starting with the 2010 issue of this publication, bound tariff statistics are based on the approved schedule of concessions for each member in the most recent HS version. This might have some implications on the historical series of various bound tariff indicators affected by the use of a different nomenclature. While the member’s commitments have not changed as a result of the transposition, some aggregate statistics might have been affected as a consequence of the change to another HS version.

Las estadísticas relativas a los aranceles aplicados y las importaciones se calculan utilizando datos basados en la nomenclatura del SA adoptada por el país para el año de referencia. Para las estadísticas relativas a los aranceles consolidados, los cálculos se basan en la Lista de concesiones aprobada del Miembro de la OMC. En las anteriores ediciones de la publicación Perfiles arancelarios en el mundo, cada Lista se basaba en la versión del SA que el Miembro utilizaba en el momento de su adhesión a la OMC. A partir de la edición de 2010, las estadísticas de los aranceles consolidados se basan en la Lista de concesiones aprobada de cada Miembro conforme a la versión más reciente del SA. Esto puede tener algunas consecuencias en la serie histórica de diversos indicadores de aranceles consolidados que se ven afectados por el uso de una nomenclatura diferente. Aunque los compromisos del Miembro no hayan cambiado como resultado de la transposición, algunas estadísticas agregadas pueden verse afectadas como consecuencia del cambio a otra versión del SA.

Queremos dar las gracias a todas las instituciones que han suministrado datos, incluidas las notificaciones que figuran en el tema especial, sobre todo a las administraciones nacionales o las delegaciones ante la OMC que han facilitado toda esta información. En algunos casos, los datos se han facilitado en sitios web nacionales o a través de organizaciones regionales. Dada la enorme cantidad de datos y metadatos estadísticos que ha sido necesario procesar, y debido a que esa información no se encuentra en una única organización, la presente publicación solo ha sido posible como esfuerzo conjunto de la OMC, el ITC y la UNCTAD. Cada una de estas tres organizaciones posee una reconocida experiencia en actividades de análisis arancelario y una destacada pericia en la materia.

Acknowledgements are due to all the data providers, mostly national administrations or WTO delegations who have made this information available including through notifications presented as a special topic. In a number of cases, data has been made available on national websites or through regional organizations. Given the vast amount of statistical data and metadata that needed to be processed, and because this information is not available in one single organization, this publication was only possible as a joint effort of the WTO, ITC, and UNCTAD. Each of the three organizations has a proven track record and comparative strengths in the field of tariff analysis.

Les auteurs tiennent à remercier tous ceux qui ont communiqué des données y compris les notifications figurant dans le sujet spécial, principalement les administrations des pays/territoires et les délégations auprès de l'OMC. Dans certains cas, les données ont été mises à disposition sur les sites Web des pays/territoires ou par l'intermédiaire d'organisations régionales. Vu le grand nombre de données statistiques et de métadonnées qu'il fallait traiter, et comme celles-ci n'étaient pas disponibles au sein d'une seule organisation, cette publication n'a été possible que grâce aux efforts conjoints de l'OMC, de l'ITC et de la CNUCED. Les trois organisations possèdent chacune une expérience reconnue et des avantages comparatifs dans le domaine de l'analyse tarifaire.

The World Tariff Profiles is a joint publication of the WTO, ITC and UNCTAD devoted to market access for goods. This statistical yearbook contains a comprehensive compilation of the main tariff parameters for each of the 164 WTO members plus other countries and customs territories where data is available. Each tariff profile presents information on tariffs imposed by each economy on its imports complemented with an analysis of the market access conditions it faces in its major export markets.

Perfiles arancelarios en el mundo es una publicación conjunta de la OMC, el ITC y la UNCTAD dedicada al acceso a los mercados para las mercancías. Este anuario estadístico contiene una amplia compilación de los principales parámetros arancelarios para cada uno de los 164 Miembros de la OMC, así como de otros países y territorios aduaneros. El perfil de cada país presenta información sobre los aranceles que cada economía impone a sus importaciones y se complementa con un análisis de las condiciones de acceso a los mercados en sus principales mercados de exportación.

The World Trade Report 2024 was prepared under the general responsibility and guidance of Johanna Hill, WTO Deputy Director-General, and Ralph Ossa, Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division. Director-General Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Chief of Staff Bright Okogu and Trineesh Biswas from the Office of the Director-General provided valuable advice and guidance.

The mission of the World Trade Organization, as set out in the preamble to its founding Marrakesh Agreement, is to use trade as a means to raise living standards, create jobs and promote sustainable development. As we mark the WTO’s 30th anniversary, it is clear that members have used the open and predictable global economy anchored in WTO rules and norms to accelerate growth and development, with enormous positive impacts for human well-being. At the same time, many people and places have not shared adequately in these gains.

Global trade is often accused of creating a more unequal world, but in fact the opposite is happening. Billions of people in developing economies are catching up to the more advanced economies, as millions of people in the advanced economies continue to move ahead. This global economic convergence is only possible because the world has become more open and integrated – expanding access to new markets, new technologies and new models for achieving rapid, sustained and inclusive growth.

The past quarter of a century has witnessed an unprecedented level of income convergence, accompanied by the integration of many developing economies into global markets. Despite this, some economies have been left behind. This chapter discusses how the participation of developing economies in global trade and investment flows can accelerate structural transformation and enhance productivity growth, thereby helping lowand middle-income economies to achieve the economic growth that ensures convergence with high-income economies. The chapter also examines why some economies have taken little advantage of globalization, and focuses on barriers to maximizing the gains from trade participation, such as trade costs and commodity dependence. Finally, the chapter discusses how recent trends in the global economy are shaping future opportunities and challenges for developing economies to leverage trade and foreign direct investment for economic growth, and which policies can help to achieve convergence in the upcoming decade.

Over the past 30 years, the world has witnessed a period of unprecedented income convergence, accompanied by a steep reduction in poverty, but inequality remains high.

Data flows are the lifeblood of our modern social and economic interactions. However, concerns related to privacy and data protection, national security, cybersecurity, digital protectionism and regulatory reach, among others, have led to a surge in regulation conditioning (or prohibiting) its flow or mandating that data be stored or processed domestically.

Global traffic from data centres is estimated to have increased fourfold since 2015 – from 5 zettabytes in 2015 to around 20 in 2021. To put that into perspective, a zettabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes (21 zeros), that is, a thousand exabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. There are 20 times more bytes of traffic from data centres than there are stars in the expanding universe.

The publication “Pathways to Sustainable Trade and Peace” was prepared under the general responsibility and guidance of Maika Oshikawa, Director of the Accessions Division.

Throughout recorded human history, interactions among diverse nations, societies and communities have been shaped by complex combinations of economic, political and social forces. A topical and highly relevant component of these interactions in today’s world relates to linkages between trade and peace.

Today, our social and economic activities are underpinned by the movement of data across international borders. They help us connect with family and friends; they support research addressing global challenges; they enable the co-ordination of production along supply chains; and allow firms, notably smaller ones, and people to access global markets. In sum, cross-border data flows have become the lifeblood of modern day social and economic activities.

Figure A D.2 displays the projected change in real exports between regions with different data localisation regimes (upper panel) and in different geopolitical blocs (lower panel) for Scenarios A-C since Scenario D is almost identical to Scenario 4 and thus already discussed in Annex C. In Scenario A No data localisation the largest projected increase in exports is projected for trade between regions with regimes 1 and 2 and other regions, for example between 0 and 1 and between 1 and 2. The reason is that data management costs are projected to fall most for these regions. In regions with regime 0 there are no projected changes in costs. This is also the case for most regions with regime 3, because they tend to have both prohibitive data localisation and data flow policies.

This report was approved by Marion Jansen (Director, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, OECD) and Ralph Ossa (Director, Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO). The authors of the report are Andrea Andrenelli (OECD), Eddy Bekkers (WTO), Javier López González (OECD), Gabrielle Marceau (WTO) and Roger So (WTO). We are grateful for the useful comments received from Julia Nielson, Susan Stone, Clarisse Girot, and Frank Van Tongeren from the OECD, Johanna Hill, Bright Okogu, Ralph Ossa, Marc Bacchetta and Antonia Carzaniga from the WTO, as well as Anabel Gonzalez (IADB) and Robert Teh. We also acknowledge the useful discussions at the: G7 Scientific Roundtable on Digital Policy and Data Governance in the age of AI held in June 2024, and the comments received during the BIICL 2023 Annual WTO Conference on Trade and Technology: Challenges and Opportunities and the 27th GTAP Conference in Bordeaux in 2023.

Hydrogen and hydrogen-derived commodities (ammonia, methanol and e-kerosene) are expected to play a crucial role in the energy transition and – in particular – the decarbonisation of many hard-to-abate end uses across industry and heavy-duty transport.

Cross-border data flows underpin today’s economic and social interactions. They help people connect with family and friends located in different geographical locations; they support research addressing global challenges (as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic); they enable the co-ordination of production along global supply chains; and they allow firms, notably smaller ones, and people to access global markets. In sum, cross-border data flows have become the lifeblood of modern day social and economic activities.

There are manifold reasons economies are reviewing their data policy. These include considerations related to privacy and data protection, national security, regulatory control or audit, digital security, and also new forms of digital industrial policy (Casalini, López González and Nemoto, 2021). While there are legitimate reasons for the diversity in regulations across economies, the regulatory landscape that underpins cross-border data flows and data localisation is becoming increasingly complex.

Both the simple and complex tariff scenarios discussed above indicate that a level of human verification is still ultimately required to ensure the quality of results after the automated tariff transposition, depending on the quality of the original tariffs datasets.

The regular work of the Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) section in the Trade Policies Review Division (TPRD) of the World Trade Organization is one among several statistical work streams that regularly require tariff line HS transposition.

In future, further refinement and testing on diverse datasets is recommended to optimize these methods for broader application. For instance, other models such as OpenAI's Text Embedding model could be compared with SBERT to compare performance rates.

Modelling the economic impacts of data regulation can help support the policy debate by presenting stakeholders with information on the potential and relative opportunity costs associated with different types of data-related measures. This information can help policy makers think about different regulations that can successfully meet public policy objectives, including privacy and data protection, in a way that imposes the least possible burden on, or trade-offs in terms of, economic activity.

I am delighted to present the World Trade Organization Secretariat’s first comprehensive report on artificial intelligence (AI) and international trade. This report marks a milestone in our efforts to understand the impacts AI is having, and will continue to have, on global trade.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming the world economy, reshaping how work is defined, how value is created, and how opportunities are distributed across societies. Given these far-reaching effects, AI is also transforming world trade.

With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular generative AI – capable of generating high-quality text, images and other content based on the data on which it is trained – entered into public consciousness and has been experiencing rapid adoption.

The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated in the last few years, and its applications hold the potential to revolutionize human society and economic activities.

This chapter provides a detailed economic analysis of the transformative potential of AI, focusing on its impact on trade and inclusive growth.

Alongside the scramble for critical goods such as personal protective equipment (PPE), the early stages of the pandemic saw an urgent need for accurate and credible information, a necessity for governments across the world confronted with an unprecedented global threat, not only to human health but also to economic and social well-being.

Effective engagement with the multifaceted challenges of the pandemic required the WTO to undertake extensive cooperation, both with established international partners and with new partners, including the creation of new cooperative arrangements.

The June 2022 Pandemic Declaration, adopted when the pandemic remained an international health emergency, was a historic development, a unanimous statement responding to a current crisis affecting communities in all members and observers and resulting from members’ input from across the spectrum.

The paper discusses the efforts deployed in 2008 and 2009 by various players, Governments, multilateral financial institutions, regional development banks, export credit agencies, to mobilize sufficient flows of trade finance to off-set some of the “pull-back” by commercial institutions in the period of acute crisis that has characterized the financial sector in the past two years. Given that 80 to 90% of trade transactions involve some form of credit, insurance or guarantee, one can reasonably say that supply-side driven shortages of trade finance have a potential to inflict further damages to international trade. As an institution geared towards the balanced expansion of world trade, the WTO had been concerned with occurrences of market tightening throughout this period. While a number of public-institutions mobilized financial resources for trade finance in the fall of 2008, this has not been enough to bridge the gap between supply and demand of trade finance worldwide. As the market situation continued to deteriorate in the first quarter of 2009, G-20 leaders in London (April 2009) adopted a wider package for injecting additional liquidity and bringing public guarantees in support of $250 billion of trade transactions in 2009 and 2010. Ahead of the Pittsburgh Meetings, experts reported that more than the targeted amount had been mobilized. In the meantime, through the summer and the fall of 2009, the market situation seemed to have eased – although in many countries, access to trade finance by the smaller traders had become either significantly more expensive or had simply disappeared. One can expect the trade finance market to have its up and downs for some time, because lending for trade is a function of the general lending situation of commercial banks. The paper discusses longer-term initiatives aimed at improving the resilience of the trade finance market to short-term and longer-term shocks.