General Objectives :
To collect, store and make accessible a set of data on standards and regulations that are imposed on EU exports of food and agricultural products into the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. The database shall facilitate a comparison of critical sets of regulations that EU exporters encounter in third countries with the international recommended standards and the home situation in the EU.
Specific objectives:
- To ensure that the approach and data focus on the EU export perspective by defining the scope of primary data collection on the basis of (1) products and (2) sectors of key interest to EU export performance and (3) critical sets of import conditions for the selected products and trade flows.
- To use and complement the information on NTMs contained in the EU Market Access Database (Madb), and other relevant databases, and to deliver to the European Commission a self-contained executable database, which can be used to update Madb as far as considered appropriate.
- To store, in principle, all data collected throughout the entire project in a structure of (i) the 6-digit harmonised system (HS6) classification of products in (agricultural) trade; and (ii) a classification of nontariff measures developed at UNCTAD in 2007 .
- To take a quality-driven approach, aimed at producing a set of fully consistent data across the 10+1 countries, on a subset of NTMs and agri-food products, and to serve the purposes of aggregate and comparative analyses.
- To apply the database as an instrument for organising and making available to internal and external users three sets of information, i.e. (i) 10+1 country contributions on NTM data, (ii) the quantitative measures of NTMs developed in WP5; (iii) the data on NTMs collected in the case studies (WP6-7). Also, the database is used to store data collected in the case studies where appropriate and feasible.
Work Package Leader: Karl Shutes and Jan Pokrivcak