Štruktúra a dynamika zmien indexov obchodných bariér v najvýznamnejších zoskupeniach krajín OECD
Structure and Dynamics of Trade Barrier Index Changes in Most Important OECD Countries´Groups

Summary/Abstract: Government’s main aim in foreign trade and investment flow control is to support the economic growth. In spite of occasionally questionable results, trade and investment barriers against the entry into the domestic market represent one of the most applied methods. The influence of various barrier forms is in the short-term horizon evident mainly by the cost increase on consumer side, in the long-term various barrier forms lead towards the general decrease of the volume of imports, and comparative advantages are weakened. During recent four decades World Trade Organisation (WTO) has reached remarkable results in the liberalisation of trade tariffs through tariff barrier disengagement, by non-tariff barriers, however, not much success has been reached. This is manifested, in addition to other factors, by the fact that international trade liberalisation and its aim among the three main economic blocks – USA, Japan and the EU, reached the multilateral agreement level. The calculation method describing how tariff and non-tariff barriers influence the international trade exchange remains, however, a problem. These barriers are transparent and unequivocal at some items, whereas at other items non-transparency and ambiguity might be the case. At such items the calculation could be considerably subjective and more strenuously provable. For comprehensive expression of non-tariff trade barriers (NTB) following indicators are currently used: – Index of imports coverage, which is the percentage share of country’s inherent import affected by non-tariff trade. This is evaluated from the actual volume of bilateral trade flow between various exporters and country’s imports. – Imports frequency (F), which is a percentage share of custom tariffs as a result of the utilisation of NTB or their group, no matter whether the relevant commodity or product are really imported or not. Database UNCTAD documents that the new OECD system of indices of trade barrier indicators can be sufficiently sensitive to evaluate differences in the influence of GATT’s Uruguay Round among groupings of NAFTA countries, EU and Japan. We verified that by the analysis of these groupings for the years 1988, 1993 and 1996 for commodity structure in two-digit ISIC classification. By the analysis of correlation coefficients of monitored variables one can see that from the point of view of the total production among the EU countries, Japan, Canada and the USA significant statistic coincidence in the average tariff load of imports exists. This is proved by the fact that by comparing the years 1993 and 1996, the correlation coefficient for all measurements (with the exception of the group of intermediate products) exceeds statistically significant criterion, in most cases reaching the value of 0.9.

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