UNCTAD’s initiatives in this area include a few standalone projects as well as an NTMs cost-effectiveness toolkit, designed specifically to evaluate NTMs for their design, implementation, and compliance. All these initiatives focus on an “ex-poste” review of NTMs with the larger goal of encouraging better practices as far as NTMs are concerned.
Assessing Cost-Effectiveness of NTMs – A Toolkit
The Non-Tariff Measures Cost-Effectiveness Toolkit is designed to provide governments and policy makers with a framework, plus respective tools to conduct such an evaluation. The toolkit is designed on 3 pillars – Design, Implementation and Compliance. The Design pillar evaluates how suitable the NTM has been/can be for meeting the stated objectives; Implementation assesses the efficacy of procedures and costs of implementing the NTM; and Compliance measures how burdensome the NTM has been on the private sector.
Prepared to review NTMs applicable to intermediate input(s) for a value chain/sector of national economic and political interest, the toolkit aims to encourage good regulatory practices amongst its users. The findings from the toolkit should enable users to generate policy options towards implementing well-designed NTMs that meet economic and non-economic policy objectives.
Objective
The NTM Cost-Effectiveness Toolkit provides a step by step implementation procedure and tools that can be used to review NTMs applicable to intermediate inputs within critical value chains. It is meant to enable users to review NTMs in terms of compliance, implementation and design – and thereby identify options to increase the effectiveness of these NTMs.
Activities
The toolkit follows a 5-step approach to reviewing NTMs.
The toolkit can be accessed here.
