There are many faces to protectionism, even when tariffs are trivially low or no longer used. Tools may include targeted domestic industrial policy, subsidies that do not deal with market failures and favour local firms, discriminatory public procurement, regulatory barriers biased in favour of local firms, closing off market access of specific sectors (often services), artificially maintaining SOE zombies, rendering take-overs impossible, using restrictive negative FDI lists, imposing local standards or SPS requirements in the presence of international agreements, etc.
For over a decade, Simon Evenett has carefully documented such trends in his Global Trade Alert. He will explain its methodology and present some rather worrying results, which underpin a following session, “Is the problem trade wars or rising protectionism?” (March 6 - 9:30).