Trade Policy Flexibilities and Turkey: Tariffs, Anti-dumping, Safeguards and WTO Dispute Settlement

The commitment to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entails political-economic trade-offs. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the flexibilities' that policymakers exercise to get around them is still relatively nascent, especially for emerging economies. This paper provides a rich, empirically based assessment of ways that Turkey exercised trade policy flexibilities during the global economic crisis of 2008-11. First, and despite multilateral and customs union commitments that might limit changes to its applied tariffs, Turkey exercised flexibilities during 2008-11 by making changes to both its applied MFN and preferential tariffs that could affect nearly 9 per cent of its manufacturing imports. Second, Turkey's cumulative application of temporary trade barrier (TTB) policies - that is, anti-dumping, safeguards and countervailing duties - is estimated to impact an additional 4-6 per cent of Turkey's manufacturing imports by 2011. Other surprising results include Turkey's lengthy extensions to the duration of previously imposed anti-dumping and safeguards beyond expected removal dates, conversion of product coverage from one TTB policy to another, extensive coverage of upstream and downstream segments of important industries and potential deepening of discriminatory preferences already inherent in existing preferential trade agreements.