standards and regulations: measuring the link to goods trade

communication FROM THE UNITED STATES

The following communication, dated 15 March 2017, is being circulated at the request of the delegation of the United States.

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1.  At the 29-30 March 2017 TBT Committee meeting, the United States will raise the following item under Agenda Item 2(D) (Other Matters relating to the Implementation and Administration of the Agreement):

·                The United States: "Standards and Regulations: Measuring the Link to Goods Trade".

2.  To encourage discussion of other national experiences, the United States will provide a presentation on a recent paper by Jeff Okun-Kozlowicki, an economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce on "Standards and Regulations: Measuring the Link to Goods Trade".

3.  Mr. Okun-Kozlowicki will discuss his June 2016 paper, which analyses WTO Members' notifications to the TBT Committee from January 2006 through mid-August 2015 to estimate the size of the link between technical regulations and exports. The paper makes the case that technical regulations in notifications can be linked to around 93% of global goods exports in 2014, which amounts to $15.6 trillion.

4.  To check the robustness of the key assumptions, the paper also analyses data on TBT-related measures collected by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which differ from TBT notifications in several important ways. The paper also reviews leading WTO Members by numbers of notifications made, as well as sectors in which products were most frequently covered by notified measures. The paper is available at http://www.trade.gov/td/osip/.

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