Peter Gallagher

There are about 8,000 records in the data­base: about 4,000 con­tain­ing SPS (‘health’)barrrier noti­fi­ca­tions and a sim­i­lar num­ber con­tain­ing TBT (‘technical’)barrier noti­fi­ca­tions. Ninety coun­tries noti­fied SPS bar­ri­ers between 1999 and the third quar­ter of 2005. Over the fold, there’s a list ofthese coun­tries, with links into the country-records in the data­base… If you are logged-in …

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 or quo­tas, for exam­ple. The WTO has tens of thou­sands of doc­u­ments from its Mem­ber gov­ern­ments report­ing the use of these bar­ri­ers and explain­ing when and how …