Trade consultant Peter Gallagher has begun posting (at his revamped blog) again, after a long hiatus.
While he was away, he created an easy-to-use data base on certain types of non-tariff barriers to trade , ("non-tariff trade measures notified to the World Trade Organization under rules permitting the exceptional use of barriers to ensure importers' compliance with technical standards or to safeguard human, animal or plant health. These regulations are known as Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) or Sanitary or Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) measures.").
You can access this for free through his blog.
About a year ago I was looking at the subject of ‘openness’ in the WTO and in other multilateral institutions such as the IMF and OECD, UNCTAD… the usual suspects. I think the WTO scores pretty well on openness given its constitution and its website is one of the main reasons. It’s full to the brim with data but not all of it is as accessible as it could be.
The data on legal non-tariff barriers is a case in point. Import barriers based on technical standards requirements or on the protection of human, animal or plant health are among the most difficult and obscure facing any exporter. Over and over again, if you talk to business people who trade, you find that these barriers rank much higher on the scale of their concerns than tariffs.
The WTO has tens of thousands of documents from its Member governments reporting the use of these barriers and explaining when and how they apply. But the ‘notifications’ to the Committees on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Committee on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Measures that contain all this information are difficult to find on the WTO website and almost impossible to search through. What importers and exporters need is a database of these measures that can be consulted easily and quickly.
There are, in fact, expensive subscription databases of national standards. But only WTO holds a record of all the ‘legal’ measures that Member governments are required to notify under threat of sanction by other governments. What I’ve done is to turn these records from ‘MS Word’ files into a searchable database (I won’t bore you with the details).
You can find an introduction to the database and access to the reports here.
If I understand this correctly, he used the Word file to create an SQL data set, and then used a product called Dataface to provide a user-friendly interface. It's worked well. I like the way Dataface describes itself:
Dataface does for MySQL what Plone did for Zope. In other words, it is a flexible and shapeable skin that sits on top of MySQL (one of the world's leading Open-source database management systems) making it accessible to normal, every-day users. In practical terms, it automagically generates the appropriate forms, lists, and menus for a user to interact with the database without having to know any SQL (structured query language).
Plome must have done something pretty good for Zope, because Dataface appears to work well in Peter's application.
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