Ranking the Trade Policies of the G20

In October 2021, the leaders of the G20 nations met for their annual summit in Rome. On the agenda were important items such as climate change, corporate taxation, and of course, the issue of global trade.

Altogether, the G20 represents 85% of global GDP and 66% of the world’s population. It is therefore important to track their trade policy regimes, as they have a significant impact on growth and development.

With this in mind, The Hinrich Foundation has analyzed the policy interventions of every G20 member following the Rome summit to see how global protectionism has advanced.

Liberalizing vs. Harmful Interventions

The first chart in this infographic measures the percentage of each nation’s total value of goods trade that has been affected by harmful or liberalizing interventions.

We define liberalizing interventions as those that liberalize on a non-discriminatory or most favored nation basis. On the other hand, harmful interventions are those that discriminate against the commercial interests of a foreign country.

From this data we can see that Brazil is the only G20 member to have liberalized more trade than it discriminated against.

Note that our data only includes 17 economies. This is because the G20 includes France, Germany, and Italy, while our dataset aggregates them under EU.