Publication: Specific Tariffs, Tariff Simplification, and the Structure of Import Tariffs in Russia, 2001-2005
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Date
2008
ISSN
00128775
Published
2008
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The Russian tariff structure contains over 11,000 tariff lines. Of these, a specific tariff may apply for about 1,700. Due to a new data set, this is the first paper to accurately assess tariff rates. We find that the average tariff in Russia has increased between 2001 and 2003, from about 11.5 percent to between 13 percent and 14.5 percent, but held steady in 2004 and 2005. This places Russia's tariffs at a level slightly higher than other middle-income countries and considerably higher than Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Russia implemented tariff simplification in 2000-2001. Contrary to conventional wisdom on the effect of tariff simplification, the trade-weighted standard deviation of the Russian tariff increased, approximately doubling from 9.5 percent in 2001 to 18 percent in 2003, but it then fell to 15.2 percent by 2005. We show that ignoring the specific tariffs results in an underestimate of average tariff rates by about one to three percentage points and an even larger underestimate of the standard deviation.
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Publication The Structure of Import Tariffs in Russia : 2001-2003(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06-20)What is the structure of the Most-Favored Nation (MFN) tariff of Russia? How has it been changing over time? What are the sectors in which tariffs are high or low? How diverse is the tariff structure of Russia? Surprisingly, these questions have not been answered to date due to a lack of data that would allow calculation of the ad valorem equivalents of the specific Russian tariffs. The authors have obtained a new data set that they describe in this book. As a result of these new data, the authors are able to calculate the ad valorem equivalents of the specific tariffs. This allows them to provide the first detailed and accurate assessment of the tariff structure of Russia. The authors are able to assess, for the years 2001-2003, the actual number of tariff lines in which specific tariffs apply, what are the tariff lines with the highest tariffs, and investigate many other properties of the Russian tariff structure for the first time. This book is arranged as follows: In section two the authors discuss the key results. The authors calculate average tariffs and standard deviations based on an unweighted basis and also an import trade weighted basis. In section three the authors discuss the data set. The authors discuss methodology in section IV. The key results are presented in tables 1-8. The authors have a one-page note on technical details in the calculations following the tables. In Appendix A the authors present tables with more detailed results, namely of 2-digit industry calculations and the tariff lines with tariff rates above 50 percent. In appendix B, the authors provide a second set of parallel tables called Estimated collected tariff rates. These tables reflect the fact that imports from CIS countries enter tariff free with some notable exceptions, so the collected tariff rate is lower than the MFN rate. As the authors discuss the results, they evaluate the trends in the tariff structure based on the view, elaborated by Tarr (2002), that low and uniform tariffs are preferable to high and diverse tariffs. This paper is methodological and descriptive, so the reader interested in a discussion of tariff policy should consult Tarr (2002).Publication The Structure of Import Tariffs in the Russian Federation : 2001-05(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-06)The Russian tariff structure contains over 11,000 tariff lines of which about 1,700 use the so-called "combined" tariff rate system. For the combined system tariff lines, the actual tariff applied by Russian customs is the maximum of the ad valorem or specific tariff. The lack of available data and the difficulty in calculating the ad valorem equivalence of the specific tariffs have resulted in some previous efforts that have simply ignored the specific tariffs. This is the first paper to accurately assess the tariff rates. The authors show that ignoring the specific tariffs results in an underestimate of the actual tariff rates by about 1 to 3 percentage points, depending on the year. The average tariff in Russia has increased between 2001 and 2003 from about 11.5 to between 13 and 14.5 percent, but it has held steady in 2004 and 2005. This places Russia's tariffs at a level slightly higher than other middle-income countries and considerably higher than the OECD countries. The trade weighted standard deviation of the tariff approximately doubled from 9.5 percent in 2001 to 18 percent in 2003, but then fell to 15.2 percent by 2005. The food sector and light industry are the aggregate sectors with the highest tariff rates-their tariff rates in 2005 were 23.1 percent and 19.5 percent on a trade-weighted basis, but the increase in their tariffs has not led to an increase in their output.Publication The Impact on Russia of WTO Accession and The Doha Agenda : The Importance of Liberalization of Barriers against Foreign Direct Investment in Services for Growth and Poverty Reduction(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-10)Taking price changes from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model of world trade, the authors use a small open economy computable general equilibrium comparative static model of the Russian economy to assess the impact of global free trade and a successful completion of the Doha Agenda on the Russian economy, and especially on the poor. They compare those results with the impact of Russian accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on income distribution and the poor. The model incorporates all 55,000 households from the Russian Household Budget Survey as "real" households. Crucially, given the importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization as part of Russian WTO accession, the authors also include FDI and Dixit-Stiglitz endogenous productivity effects from liberalization of import barriers against goods and FDI in services. The authors estimate that Russian WTO accession in the medium run will result in gains averaged over all Russian households equal to 7.3 percent of Russian consumption (with a standard deviation of 2.2 percent of consumption), with virtually all households gaining. They find that global free trade would result in a weighted average gain to households in Russia of 0.2 percent of consumption, with a standard deviation of 0.2 percent of consumption, while a successful completion of the Doha Development Agenda would result in a weighted average gain to households of -0.3 percent of consumption (with a standard deviation of 0.2 percent of consumption). Russia, as a net food importer, loses from subsidy elimination, and the gains to Russia from tariff cuts in other countries are too small to offset these losses. The results strongly support the view that Russia's own liberalization is more important than improvements in market access as a result of reforms in tariffs or subsidies in the rest of the world. Foremost among the own reforms is liberalization of barriers against FDI in business services.Publication Impact of WTO Accession and the Customs Union on the Bound and Applied Tariff Rates of the Russian Federation(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-08)After 18 years of negotiations, Russia has joined the World Trade Organization. This paper assesses how the tariff structure of the Russian Federation will change as a result of the phased implementation of its World Trade Organization commitments between 2012 and 2020 and how it has changed as a result of its agreement to participate in a Customs Union with Kazakhstan and Belarus. The analysis uses trade data at the ten digit level, which allows the first accurate assessment of the impact of these policy changes. It finds that World Trade Organization commitments will progressively and significantly lower the applied tariffs of the Russian Federation. After all commitments are implemented, tariffs will fall from 11.5 percent to 7.9 percent on an un-weighted average basis, or from 13.0 percent to 5.8 percent on a weighted average basis. The average "bound" tariff rate of Russia under its World Trade Organization commitments will be 8.6 percent, that is, 0.7 percentage points higher than the applied tariffs. Russia's commitments represent significant tariff liberalization, but compared with other countries that have acceded to the World Trade Organization, the commitments of the Russian Federation are not unusual, especially when compared with the Transition countries.Publication Poverty Effects of Russia's WTO Accession : Modeling "Real" Households and Endogenous Productivity Effects(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-01)The authors use a computable general equilibrium comparative static model of the Russian economy to assess the impact of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on income distribution and the poor. Their model is innovative in that they incorporate all 55,000 households from the Russian Household Budget Survey as "real" households in the model. This is accomplished because they develop a new algorithm for solving general equilibrium models with a large number of agents. In addition, they include foreign direct investment and Dixit-Stiglitz endogenous productivity effects in their trade and poverty analysis. In the medium term, the authors find that virtually all households gain from Russian WTO accession, with 99.9 percent of the estimated gains falling within a range between 2 and 25 percent increases in household income. They show that their estimates are decisively affected by liberalization of barriers against foreign direct investment in business services sectors and endogenous productivity effects in business services and goods. The authors use their integrated model to assess the error associated with a "top down" approach to micro-simulation. They find that approximation errors introduced by failing to account for income effects in the conventional sequential approach are very small. However, data reconciliation between the national accounts and the household budget survey is important to the results. Despite the estimated gains for virtually all households in the medium term, many households may lose in the short term because of the costs of transition. So, safety nets are crucial for the poorest members of society during the transition.
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