Non-Tariff Trade Barriers—Their Fallacies and Implications

One of the important facets of the post war-trade structure was the exclusive use of tariffs as a commercial policy instrument to regulate trade across the frontiers. But in the period after late 1960s, the importance of tariffs steadily declined as tariff reductions under multilateral trade negotiations and non-tariff trade barriers 1 assumed greater significance in the developed market-economy countries to protect their domestic industry from foreign competition . In this paper, an attempt has been made to critically examine a case for imposing non-tariff barriers by the developed countries on their imports. There has also been an endeavour to assess the implications of such trade distortive measures for the countries imposing these restrictions as well as for the countries whose exports are affected by the application of such measures, with a special reference to the impact on the developing countries which generally have to bear the brunt of these protectionist measures .