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> In seeking to find politically expedient ways to open their economies, governments are increasingly looking for opportunities to do so bilaterally, regionally or multilaterally. The reason is that the political market equilibrium in two or more countries can be altered in favour of liberalism through an exchange of product market access. If country A allows more imports, it may well harm its importcompeting producers if there are insufficient compensation mechanisms; but if this liberalization is done in return for country A’s trading partners lowering their barriers to A’s exports, the producers of those exports will be better off. The latter extra benefit may be sufficiently greater than the loss to A’s import-competing producers that A’s liberalizing politicians too become net gainers in terms of electoral, financial or other support in return for negotiating a trade agreement. When politicians in the countries trading with A also see the possibility for gaining from such an exchange of market access, for equal and opposite reasons, prospects for trade negotiations are ripe.

Such gains from trade negotiations involving exchange of market access are potentially greater nationally and globally, the larger the number of countries involved and the broader the product and issues coverage of the negotiations. That is the logic behind negotiating multilaterally with nearly 150 WTO member countries over a wide range of sectors and issues. That WTO process is becoming increasingly cumbersome, however, which has led countries also to negotiate bilaterally or regionally in the hope that faster and deeper integration will result. Preferential free trade areas involving just a subset of countries need not be welfare-enhancing for all participant nations, however, because of trade diversion away from the lowest-cost supplier; and non-participants in the rest of the world may be made worse off too (Pomfret 1997; Schiff and Winters 2003). Hence the need for empirical analysis of the likely gains from different types of prospective trade agreements.

Conclusion

At the time when import tariffs have fallen substantially in almost all countries, non-tariff measures conspicuously grew. While some NTMs are not necessarily instituted to curtail foreign trade as such but rather, for health, sanitary and safety considerations, they nevertheless, tend to limit trade, especially from developing to developed economies, usually because the comparative levels of health and safety standards are naturally disparate.

Thus, one important lesson from the study of NTMs is that the inventiveness of those seeking protection is limitless. With the setting up of the WTO, tariffs applied by many countries has considerable been reduced. This has also contributed in the reduction of barriers between countries and has consequently, promoted globalisation.

However, due to the mushrooming of NTMs, countries and business have faced many problems. Hence, categorising and measuring NTMs provides the basis for policy change to counter any trend to NTMs popping up as “inefficient protection” to replace the relatively more “efficient” protection conferred by tariff.

There are also important ancillary domestic policy implications from an NTM-induced dampening of responsiveness of imports to tariff changes, in particular regarding the erosion of the effectiveness of trade in disciplining domestic本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。