Trade Policy Barriers: An Obstacle to Export Diversification in Eurasia

Journal Title: Journal of Banking and Financial Economics - Year 2015, Vol 2, Issue 4

Abstract

Despite trade liberalization efforts made by Eurasian countries, the export structure of the region shows significant levels of concentration across export destinations. To shed light on this observation, this research analyzes trade policy barriers in Eurasia, East Asia and the Pacific, and the European Union. Using the most recent data from sources including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank – including the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Indices, the Services Trade Restrictions Database, and the Temporary Trade Barriers Database – the role of tariffs, non-tariff measures, temporary trade barriers, trade agreements, and trade barriers in services are explored to explain the lack of diversification by destination. Several conclusions can be drawn from the analysis. First, China, Korea, and Japan, as well as the European Union, impose high levels of protection on products of animal origin, which may explain the lack of Eurasian export diversification toward the East Asia and the Pacific and the European Union regions. It also highlights the potential benefits of diversifying the structure of production in Eurasia toward more sophisticated and technologically intensive goods. Second, the East Asia and the Pacific region (especially China) appears to be more protectionist than the European Union, suggesting a greater challenge for Eurasian countries in diversifying exports to the destination. And third, few or no regional trade agreements exist between Eurasian countries and countries in the European Union or East Asia and the Pacific.

Authors and Affiliations

Ana Paula Cusolito, Claire H. Hollweg

Keywords

Related Articles

Deep Roots of Fiscal Behavior

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990–2012. The empirical re...

Risk, capital buffers and bank lending: The adjustment of euro area banks

This paper estimates euro area banks’ internal target capital ratios and investigates whether banks’ adjustment to the targets affects their credit supply and securities holdings during the financial crisis in 2005–2011....

The Day After Tomorrow: Designing an Optimal Fiscal Strategy for Libya

Libya is highly dependent on exhaustible and volatile hydrocarbon resources, which constitute the bulk of government revenues. Although resource wealth provides the means to promote socio-economic development, procyclica...

The relationship between distance-to-default and CDS spreads as measures of default risk for European banks

CDS spreads are often seen as the ’leading’ market based, default risk measure. There is no popular alternative to CDS spreads except perhaps for the distance-to-default (D2D) measure based on Merton (1974), which comes...

Sovereign Debt Restructurings in Belize: Debt Sustainability and Financial Stability Aspects

This paper examines the causes, processes, and outcomes of the two Belize sovereign debt restructurings in 2006–07 and in 2012–13, which occurred outside an IMF-supported program. It finds that the motivation for the two...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP347859
  • DOI 10.7172/2353-6845.jbfe.2015.2.6
  • Views 109
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Ana Paula Cusolito, Claire H. Hollweg (2015). Trade Policy Barriers: An Obstacle to Export Diversification in Eurasia. Journal of Banking and Financial Economics, 2(4), 91-129. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-347859