ESTIMATES OF DISTORTIONS OF THE ECONOMIES OF THE EAEU COUNTRIES FROM EXISTING NON-TARIFF BARRIERS» (first stage)

Abstract

Inevitably, non-tariff barriers (NTBs) that exist in trade between countries generate rents associated with them, which can either be distributed in some ratio between trading partners or dissipate, thereby leading to a loss of resources. The valuation of these rents and their distribution is not an easy task, because the effect of NTBs in their entirety is usually difficult to quantify due to the different nature of the trade restrictions that make up NTBs. Nevertheless, in the light of the global trend towards tariff liberalization that has been going on for more than a hundred years, this task sometimes becomes more important in the study of trade than classical studies of the impact of import and/or export tariffs, since NTB rents can multiply tariff revenue. One of the possible tools for modeling the impact of NTBs on the economies of various countries (and in particular on the domestic prices of goods), taking into account the existing trade relations between states, are static CGE trading models (from the English Computable General Equilibrium models computable general equilibrium models). One of the objectives of this study is to prepare our own database based on the most recent available statistical data, similar in structure to the GTAP 10 database, but with a smaller number of regions and supplemented with information about the ad valorem equivalents of the goods we are interested in in the context of trading partners. As the results in this study, the following aspects of the work carried out can be distinguished, such as a review of the literature on existing approaches to assessing the imbalances of economies generated by NTM, as well as an analysis of trade in goods and services between the EAEU countries and their main partners, which is necessary for interpreting the results of the numerical modeling stage, a scheme for preparing input data for calibration of the used CGE models.

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