A Free trade Agreement (FTA) is an agreement between two or more countries where the countries agree on certain obligations that affect trade in goods and services. FTAs reduces barriers to export and imports between countries by eliminating or reducing tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and prohibitions which cover trade in goods (such as agricultural or industrial products) or trade in services (such as banking, construction, trading etc.). It also covers other areas such as intellectual property rights (IPRs), investment, government procurement and competition policy etc. By these FTAs, FTA partners get easy market access by eliminating or negotiating tariffs and non-tariff barriers.

This database tries to capture both the essence of tariff and non-tariff measures imposed by the countries, so the FTA negotiators can retrieve the information from one place. This web portal contains Basic Custom Duties (BCD) imposed by the countries and the Non-Tariff Measures data of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measure (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) linked with the HS Codes. The BCD data provides information on duties imposed by the countries at the HS Heading level (6 digits) and the SPS and TBT databases provide a trade links at the HS heading level (4 digits) for all the notifications notified by the WTO members. ...To date, the assessment of tariff and Non-tariff measures records is not available in a single place across all the existing databases worldwide. This query project provides an evaluation to address India's market access concerns across its trading partners—both bilaterally and within a group. Therefore, this data query provides the same for WTO members, with notification on SPS and TBT from 1995 to 2022 against tariffs applied and expressed as “BCD” by India and the tariff used in the markets (WTO membership) in Ad valorem equivalence. We have not opted for Ad valorem tariffs, which may mislead the assessment. The results are provided at the national tariff lines (NTLs) as the FTA negotiations happen at the most disaggregated level.

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Developed by Dr. Murali Kallummal, Professor and Head Administration (CRIT) and Team