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After 18 years of negotiations, Russia has joined the World Trade Organization. This paper assesses how the tariff structure of the Russian Federation will change as a result of the phased implementation of its World Trade Organization commitments between 2012 and 2020 and how it has changed as a result of its agreement to participate in a Customs Union with Kazakhstan and Belarus. The analysis uses trade data at the ten digit level, which allows the first accurate assessment of the impact of these policy changes. It finds that World Trade Organization commitments will progressively and significantly lower the applied tariffs of the Russian Federation. After all commitments are implemented, tariffs will fall from 11.5 percent to 7.9 percent on an un-weighted average basis, or from 13.0 percent to 5.8 percent on a weighted average basis. The average "bound" tariff rate of Russia under its World Trade Organization commitments will be 8.6 percent, that is, 0.7 percentage points higher than the applied tariffs. Russia's commitments represent significant tariff liberalization, but compared with other countries that have acceded to the World Trade Organization, the commitments of the Russian Federation are not unusual, especially when compared with the Transition countries.

Applied tariffs --- Bound tariffs --- Customs union --- Debt Markets --- Export Competitiveness --- Free Trade --- International Economics & Trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Poverty Reduction --- Tariff policy --- Trade Policy --- WTO accession --- Russia

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The Russian tariff structure contains over 11,000 tariff lines of which about 1,700 use the so-called "combined" tariff rate system. For the combined system tariff lines, the actual tariff applied by Russian customs is the maximum of the ad valorem or specific tariff. The lack of available data and the difficulty in calculating the ad valorem equivalence of the specific tariffs have resulted in some previous efforts that have simply ignored the specific tariffs. This is the first paper to accurately assess the tariff rates. The authors show that ignoring the specific tariffs results in an underestimate of the actual tariff rates by about 1 to 3 percentage points, depending on the year. The average tariff in Russia has increased between 2001 and 2003 from about 11.5 to between 13 and 14.5 percent, but it has held steady in 2004 and 2005. This places Russia's tariffs at a level slightly higher than other middle-income countries and considerably higher than the OECD countries. The trade weighted standard deviation of the tariff approximately doubled from 9.5 percent in 2001 to 18 percent in 2003, but then fell to 15.2 percent by 2005. The food sector and light industry are the aggregate sectors with the highest tariff rates-their tariff rates in 2005 were 23.1 percent and 19.5 percent on a trade-weighted basis, but the increase in their tariffs has not led to an increase in their output.

Customs union --- Debt Markets --- Export Competitiveness --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Free Trade --- Free trade zone --- Import volume --- International Economics & Trade --- International trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Political Economy --- Public Sector Development --- Tariff policy --- Tariff revenues --- Tariff structure --- Trade agreements --- Trade Policy --- Trade policy

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As the economic crisis deepens and widens, fears of a return to the protectionist spiral of the 1930s become more common. However, an important difference between the 1930s and today is the existence of the World Trade Organization and the legal limits it imposes on the protectionist responses members can pursue. The objective of this paper is threefold. First, to assess the extent to which applied tariff can legally be raised without violating tariff-bound obligations, and compare it with what is economically possible. Second, to examine what has been the protectionist response of individual countries when facing an economic crisis since the creation of the WTO. Finally, to predict how far the protectionist responses will go during the current crisis. Results suggest that the policy space left when looking at what is economically possible is indeed quite large. However, in the recent past very little of the available policy space has been used by countries suffering from an economic crisis. Our predictions for the current crisis are modest tariff hikes in the order of 8 percent.

Debt Markets --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Free Trade --- Global trade --- Import duties --- Import value --- Imports --- International Economics & Trade --- International trade --- International Trade and Trade Rules --- Member countries --- Non-tariff barriers --- Preferential agreements --- Preferential trade agreements --- Protectionism --- Protectionist --- Public Sector Development --- Regional trade --- Tariff act --- Tariff bindings --- Tariff changes --- Tariff increases --- Tariff lines --- Tariff policy --- Trade barriers --- Trade Policy --- Water Conservation --- Water Resources --- World trade