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Starting in the 1960s with the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), nontariff measures (NTMs) have been replacing tariffs continuously as the core element of trade negotiations.Today they take centre stage in all EU trade agreements with industrialised and emerging economies. By matching product codes to the rich data of NTM notifications to the World Trade Organization and complementary information provided by the Temporary Trade Barriers Database, we provide a valuable open data source for trade policy analysis. Using data for 148 NTM-imposing economies for the period 1995-2019, we describe the evolution of different types of NTMs along countries and sectors, with a special focus on NTMs implemented by the EU. The analysis of our data, paired with comparisons with other sources, shows the merits and shortcomings of the WTO's service in providing transparency over members' trade policies.

In this paper, we present import demand elasticities estimated for 167 countries over 5,124 products at the six-digit level of the Harmonised System. Following the semiflexible translog GDP function approach proposed by Kee et al. (2008), we estimate unilateral import demand elasticities for the period 1996-2014. Results are differentiated by country and product characteristics. South Asia and North America are associated with the most elastic import demand. Countries exhibiting the highest average elasticities belong to the economically most important countries in their respective regions, while countries with the lowest import demand elasticities are typically small island states. Import-weighted results suggest that especially countries rich in natural resources -particularly fossil fuels -are facing an inelastic import demand, with the agrifood sector for these states being more price-responsive than the manufacturing sector. Demand is found to be least price-sensitive for machinery and electrical equipment, and most price-elastic for the energy sectors. Distinguishing between the use of products, the highest import demand elasticities are associated with intermediate goods, which appears particularly noteworthy in the context of an increasing importance of global value chains, the global trade slowdown since 2011 and ongoing negotiations of mega-regional trade deals.

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The EU-Korea trade agreement, which has been applied since 2011, has ushered in a new era of deep trade integration. Eight years later, the EU-Japan agreement was declared the new “gold standard” of EU trade relations. Korea and Japan are important trading partners for the EU. However, their significance goes beyond the bilateral relationship. Over the past few years, they have been integrated into a network of cross-regional agreements that may facilitate the spread of their definitional and normative principles. These include ASEAN + 3 and the two remaining mega-regional agreements, CPTPP and RCEP. Simultaneously, they have become very active in plurilateral and multilateral negotiations in sparsely regulated economic sectors, such as the digital economy and advancing technologies. The EU free trade agreements with these “like-minded” partners in East Asia show how existing international norms, standards, and institutions are being strengthened and how they aim to collaboratively create future standards for international trade.