Measurement of Protection

Abstract

Protection is defined broadly as government action or inaction that discriminates in favor of home producers against foreign pro-ducers. Measurement of protection has two aspects: observing or inferring protection at the product level and appropriately aggregat-ing the highly differentiated product level protection to manageable indexes of protection. Better practice in each aspect makes a very sig-nificant difference to the measured level of protection across product groups, countries and time.