Editor's Introduction

摘要

The first paper in this issue, by Oleksandr Shepotylo and David G. Tarr, examines the effects of Russia's trade liberalization through the phase-in of its membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the implementation of a customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus. Russia, as part of its membership in the WTO, has committed to implement reductions in its tariffs over the period 2012-20. This liberalization of its trade will, to a large extent, reverse previous protectionist trends (see Shepotylo and Tarr 2008). The authors use ten-digit tariff line-level trade and tariff data in order to obtain a more precise estimate of ad valorem tariff rate equivalents of specific tariffs, making their estimates more precise than those of previous studies, which used more aggregated data to calculate ad valorem equivalents or ignored them altogether. The authors find that Russia's ad valorem equivalent tariffs will fall from 13.0 percent on a weighted average basis in 2012 to 5.8 percent in 2020.