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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of Indonesia’s technical barriers to trade (TBT) on manufacturing exports.

This study uses the UNCTAD database to calculate the coverage ratio and frequency index of TBTs, which represent the restrictiveness of TBTs on imports. The effects of TBTs are estimated using the gravity model (Tinbergen, 1962) and the pseudo-Poisson maximum likelihood methodology (Santos Silva and Tenreyro, 2006, 2011).

An estimation on the manufacturing sector shows that TBT reduces Indonesia’s manufacturing exports. However, the effect of TBT is different in disaggregated manufacturing sector. TBT is found to reduce exports of chemicals and transportation but increase exports of metal and textiles. This finding supports the empirical evidence that TBT can create trade-impeding and demand-enhancing effects on trade flows. The negative effect of TBT on chemical and transportation exports implies that the cost of compliance is higher than the increasing demand rate. This finding suggests the need for policy evaluation and improvements for restrictive TBT. As Indonesia is still highly dependent on imported inputs, restrictive TBT can potentially reduce the productivity of the Indonesian manufacturing sector.

This study aims to investigate the effects of TBT in Indonesia, as a manufacturing-based economy that relies heavily on imported intermediate inputs. Furthermore, this study contributes to the literature by using country-specific techniques and aggregated and disaggregated manufacturing sectors as subjects for study. Meanwhile, previous studies use multi-country and multi-product approaches and focus on the aggregate sector. This study estimates the effects of TBT on the disaggregated sector, given its high share of imported inputs and reliance on export-oriented industries. TBT is constructed in a more detailed product level (HS-4 digit level) to provide more accurate results.

The main objectives of this study were to examine the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) agricultural exports to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the tuning of the Agricultural Commodity Frequency Index (ACFI) to non-tariff measures (NTMs), and the coverage ratio of goods to determine the effects of the PRC’s NTMs on Lao PDR’s agricultural exports using a demand export model with a fixed-effect method. The authors found that Lao PDR’s agricultural exports to the PRC increased by an average of 46.91% from 2013 to 2020, covering a total of 51 product codes, comprising six of the most valuable product types (i.e., bananas, corn, tapioca flour, watermelon, sticky rice, and sweet potato) given priority by the PRC. Additionally, from 2013 to 2020, the average ACFI concentration with NTMs was 10.08%, and the average coverage ratio for goods was 14.43%. The results of statistical significance testing at 1% suggest that three factors demonstrated the most significant impact on value: agricultural products facing NTMs in the form of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and technical barriers to trade (TBTs), treaties with priority conditions regarding SPSs and priorities for agricultural products, and the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the PRC. Furthermore, a PRC GDP increase of 1% resulted in a 3.1235% impact on Lao PDR exports.

Nontariff Measures (NTMs) encompass all policy instruments other than tariffs, from labeling requirements to macro-policies affecting trade. These measures have been growing as tariffs have been greatly reduced and sometimes eliminated through numerous global and preferential trade agreements such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, as well as regional trade agreements (RTAs). Among NTMs particularly, sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have been proliferating. These measures have much in common as they act as standards affecting cost and potentially demand by addressing market imperfections (asymmetric information, external effects) (Bacchetta & Beverelli, 2012).

Can transparency mitigate the trade-distortive effects of nontariff measures (NTMs)? This chapter explores the trade impact associated with promoting greater transparency in NTMs, using a new database of transparency provisions in over 100 Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). The investigation surveys the incidence and scope of transparency provisions in RTAs, and econometrically assesses the trade effects of these instruments on bilateral agricultural and food trade. The findings demonstrate that transparency provisions in RTAs are associated with greater agricultural trade flows, suggesting that transparency should remain an important element of ongoing policy efforts to make NTMs less onerous for trade in agriculture.

This paper attempts to examine the implications of non‐tariff measures (NTMs) on firms' international business operations through a survey of India's textiles and clothing exporting firms. The main objectives of the study are to identify and assess the impact of NTMs, and analyze the cost incurred in complying with them.

This paper is based on the survey which was jointly undertaken with the Market Research Division of Textiles Committee, Mumbai.

The results reveal that the EU and USA‐based buyers are more restrictive with significantly higher NTM incidences. The technical barriers, product and production process standards, and conformity assessment requirement for technical barriers are the widely used NTM categories. The compliance expenditure may vary according to firm size, and an inverse relation is revealed by this study. The larger and smaller firms demonstrate important differences in compliance due to their varying resource endowments. Further, the regression results suggest that the US and EU markets and firms' product profile/type are an important determinant of compliance cost.

This study contributes to the understanding about the implications of NTMs on Indian firms, and the inferences may be tested in other similar Asian markets. However, a further empirical validation of the issues such as NTMs as promotion and marketing tools is warranted.

South‐South trade is the fastest growing segment of world trade in the last two decades. This paper aims at demonstrating that it is a unique opportunity and a sound development tool for developing countries.

The paper describes the statistical and empirical evidence from a macroeconomic and microeconomic viewpoint, and discusses the policy options developing country governments face to promote South‐South trade and investment.

Not all regions, countries, products and services fare equally in the current state of play. That South‐South trade expands at a much faster pace than other trade, although it is subject to higher barriers and higher distance‐related costs, suggests that addressing trade facilitation issues is of the essence for future progress, including major investments in trade‐related infrastructure, like the modernization of air and water ports, roads, transport and customs services.

South‐South trade expansion is a market‐driven development – mostly resulting from the widespread operation of international supply chains of the South – that may be enhanced by government intervention but seldom spearheaded by it in the long run.

The “natural” next questions are whether South‐South trade can be an alternative to North‐South trade, whether the learning process for international trading is enhanced or retarded by it, and whether the proliferation of PTAs is strangulating progress in rules‐based multilateralism, the first‐best choice according to mainstream economic theory. Even more important in development terms is whether South‐South trade can help bring developing countries, small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and the poor into the export process or, rather, it is a distraction from the real targets. This paper suggests there are robust answers to these queries already.

The purpose of this study is to investigate international trade determinants, paying special attention to variables related to climate change and non-tariff measures (NTMs), as they shape more and more world trade flows, with particular incidence on globalised goods, such as wine.

Based on panel data of Port wine exports to 60 countries, between 2006 and 2018, a gravity model has been estimated through Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood. Explanatory variables include NTMs, mean temperature, temperature anomaly, gross domestic product (GDP), exchange rate, ad valorem equivalent tariffs and home bias.

The findings show that exports are inversely related to both mean temperature and temperature anomaly in importing countries. Regarding NTMs, it is found that only part of them are trade deterrent. Additionally, purchasing power in importing countries is one of the main determinants of Port wine exports.

The results show that, besides traditional economic variables, policymakers and wineries should include in their exports' decisions the impact of variables related to climate change and NTMs.

The novelty of this paper is to incorporate the impact of climatic variability of importing countries as a determinant of international trade of wine. Most former studies inspired of the gravity model consider explanatory variables such as GDP and exchange rate, and more recent ones started to consider NTMs too, however, this study may be the first paper to include the impact of climate change (quantified by mean temperature and temperature anomaly in importing countries) on exports.

This study aims to identify and classified non-tariff measures (NTMs) on Brazilian imports of robusta coffee beans, calculated a tariff-equivalent of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) and assessed the effects of removing NTBs from upstream and downstream domestic instant coffee supply chain.

The analysis uses documentary research to identify NTMs and the price-wedge method is applied to estimate a tariff-equivalent. The effects of suppressing the tariff-equivalent were evaluated using a partial equilibrium model with constant elasticity of substitution (Armington, 1969) and by incorporating vertical integration and uncertainty (Hallren and Opanasets, 2018).

The results show that NTMs seemingly hinder the entrance of coffee beans into the domestic market. The tariff-equivalent was estimated at 13.61%. Suppressing it reveals that the share of domestic coffee beans used to produce domestic instant coffee falls 0.21 p.p. while the share of domestic instant coffee consumed by the international trade rises 8.60 p.p.

What makes this paper original is that this paper investigated the effects of NTMs in a developing country, namely, Brazil. Although Brazil is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, it has not appeared in literature in this type of analysis until now. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature on using existing techniques to investigate the impact of NTM removal on individual products in a specific country, in contrast to more recent papers that discuss using multi-country and multi-product data sets at the HTS-6 level. Thus, this paper demonstrates how a case study approach can be useful in quantifying policy changes.

This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political economy analyses. It explores the contributions of different network approaches and draws on the French convention and regulation traditions, which provide alternative guidelines for confronting micro–macro tensions. Networks have similarly assumed analytical centrality in the new institutional economics and subsequent elaborations of the Williamsonian transaction costs paradigm have involved an approximation to some of the central tenets of social network analysis. Alternative traditions of political economy analysis (Global Value Chains (GVC), Global Production Networks) are now making an important contribution to agrofood studies. A distinctive feature of these analysts is their overture to social networks, actor-network, transaction costs and convention theory in the effort to capture the multiple dimensions of economic power and coordination. The possibilities for a fruitful convergence between these apparently conflicting approaches are best captured in the emergence of the concept of the “netchain”. At the same time, the intractability of values to absorption within economic transactions suggests the need to move forward to a focus on the tensions between netchains and social movements and a different type of network, the global policy network.

This work affords a practical checklist that specifies the civil engineering trades-related hazards and offers a safety indicator to identify the safety level of a construction project concerning the hazards of the civil engineering trades.

The methodology depends on reviewing the archival works, visiting the construction sites, utilizing the direct observation and preliminary hazard analysis methods and conducting semistructured interviews to pinpoint and validate the checklist of the civil engineering trades-related hazards. Additionally, a questionnaire-based survey with the rank sum weight technique has been employed to assemble and analyze the data required to build the safety indicator.

Relying upon the used methodology, 70 hazards under the trades of general environment, earth, demolition, excavation, concrete, dewatering, waterproofing insulation and scaffolding have been pinpointed and validated. This is in addition to the safety level indicator of the civil engineering trades-related hazards (SLICETH), which indicates high viability during its validation in five national and international projects.

The value of this work lies in its ability to tackle the gap existing in the safety management knowledge regarding the notion of the hazards of the civil engineering trades and their influences on the safety performance of the construction projects. As a result, it offers a complete knowledge to the academics and the practitioners for confronting the negative impacts of the civil engineering trades-related hazards. Consequently, it helps in enhancing the safety performance level in the sites of the construction projects.