“One of the principal themes of this paper is that the analysis of a country’s traditional and non-traditional exports and export markets must be done at a highly disaggregated level. This is true because—for most purposes—data on market access barriers are meaningful only at a highly disaggregated level. Granted, for general trade policy discussions it is useful to know, for example, that the European Union average tariff on fish and fish products is far above the average for all EU goods. But no country or firm actually exports “fish and fish products”. They export one or more very narrowly defined categories that vary by type of fish and degree of processing and, similarly, the tariffs and non-tariff barriers they encounter can vary enormously within what appears to the non-specialist to be a more or less homogeneous product category.”
