Tariff protection, tariff escalation and African Countries: who are the real friends?

Tariff protection of the final sectors and tariff escalation are said to be among the major obstacles for developing countries to up-grade the value chain and enjoy the gains from trade. For this reason, these are key issues to analyse trade negotiations. In this paper we focus on the trade relations between nine (both LDC and non-LDC) African countries and some of the big world trade players: USA, China, India, Japan and EU. Our objective is to determine which importing country is offering the less adverse – in terms of obstacles faced by the exporting African countries to up-grade in the value chain – tariff structure. To this end, we perform two exercises. First we assess the effective rate of protection using a CGE model through GTAP and computing the OERP index (Anderson, 1998). Second, we evaluate tariff escalation using a number of measures. We compare the results from the two exercises showing differences and complementarities in the two analysis presented in the paper.