New Trade Restrictions Will Complicate Global Supply Chains

As noted in our Top Story, a “concerted response” must be made in the global economy to address supply chain disruptions in 2017.

One step will be for G20 members to deliver on their commitment to refrain from imposing new trade-restrictive measures and roll back existing ones.

According to the WTO, the initiation of trade remedy investigations remained the most frequently applied measure by far, representing 72% of trade-restrictive measures and above the average share observed since 2009. The G20 economies initiated far more trade remedy actions (61) than were terminated (36) during the latest reporting period. Metal products (in particular steel), chemicals, and plastics and rubber account for the largest shares of anti-dumping and countervailing initiations during the review period.

On the positive side, the new trade-facilitating measures include those implemented in the context of the newly expanded Information Technology Agreement (ITA) and which have very broad trade coverage.

The number of these measures does not provide a complete picture of the extent of these measures nor their impact, but WTO Secretariat estimates indicate that the ITA expansion measures which were implemented by certain members during the review period cover around $375 billion in annual global trade.

The G20 economies are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Republic of Korea, Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union.

SC
MR