Trade Restrictiveness Index of Non-Tariff Barriers Under the CES Preference

摘要

The literature has suggested formulas for trade restrictiveness index of tariffs based on second-order approximation. This paper shows that in a special case of the constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) preference the trade restrictiveness index of non-tariff barriers can be derived explicitly without using approximation and is simply the weighted (σ — 1 )th-power average of non-tariff barriers, where σ is the elasticity of substitution and the weights are the observed expenditure shares of imported goods. Numerical simulations show that the proposed index accurately measures the aggregate of non-tariff barriers while other indices have persistent measurement errors.