Trade Barrier Index
The International Trade Barrier Index (TBI) follows on the success of its sister index the International Property Rights Index used by think tanks, governments, private industry, and academics from around the world to assess their property rights environment.
After observing rising trade tensions across the world, the need was made clear for a tool that could reveal trade barriers, in all their various forms, as the barriers to economic and individual freedoms they are. The problem: too often the trade debate is distracted by political spin or bureaucratic standard setting that treat individuals, and their freedoms, as bystanders.
The Trade Barrier Index is the response to that need. The first edition was released in 2019, providing data on tariffs, non-tariff measures, services restrictions, and the trade facilitation environment for 86 countries in an easily comparative format.
The TBI is designed to be used as tool for policymakers, business communities, and civic activists to highlight the harms cause by trade barriers and the net befits to be gained from reducing them. More than the sum of its parts, free trade, unhampered by artificial restraints, allows individuals to exchange ideas, social customs, goods, and services on mutually beneficial terms they determine. It rewards the most efficient allocation of resources and celebrates specialization. The next iterations of the TBI will be able to reflect changes over time and deliver more tools to aide in the research of trade barriers.
Foreword From
Lord Dan Hannan
Never in all the years since this Index was first published has the news been so unremittingly depressing. The last time the world saw a swing away from free trade on anything like this scale, years of horror followed: the Depression, the rise of the dictators, the Holodomor, the Holocaust.
Then, the chief beneficiary of the old open commercial system (the United Kingdom) moved late and reluctantly to protectionism. This time, the chief beneficiary (the United States) is leading the charge.
Overall, the Index ranks the US 61st, a poor position reflecting its relatively few trade deals, its fondness for protectionist actions at the WTO and its maintenance of a range of non-tariff barriers. But that ranking does not reflect the new tariff lines announced by President Trump on April 2, 2025. If those barriers remain in place – and, as I write, the issue remains uncertain – then the US will plummet to 113th place out of 122.
Part of President Trump’s rationale was that he was reciprocating against protectionism overseas. But, as the figures collected here show, he has targeted the world’s most open economies: Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong and Canada. These countries not only have low or zero tariffs, but are open to foreign businesses, have light regulations, enforce contracts fairly, defend property rights and have avoided the temptation to regulate digital trade.
Not coincidentally, they are all relatively wealthy places. As in past years, the world’s freest economies account for most of its GDP. Show me a country with high tariffs and I’ll show you an economic basket case. Russia and Venezuela are among the least open economies on the planet.
What makes America’s lurch into protectionism so alarming is that it is not a complete reversal so much as the exaggeration and acceleration of a trend that has been building since 2008, a trend away from the open markets that brought us unprecedented prosperity after 1945.
Even the United Kingdom, which had until now been using its Brexit freedoms to develop a more liberal trade policy than the EU, has slipped back, largely because of its digital regulations.
Perhaps inescapably, we never properly appreciated the extent to which our wealth depended on open sea-lanes and extended supply-lines. Human beings have a genetic disposition to protectionism, being ruled by intuitions better suited to Palaeolithic self-reliance than to the modern world.
The claims made by Trump and by his equivalents in other countries will always find a ready audience. People are primed to accept the idea that a trade deficit is unsustainable, that a country should grow its own food, that competition with a lower-wage economy is unfair, that key industries need to be privileged. The trouble is that all these claims, when translated into policy, make a country needlessly poorer.
In the end, free traders must win with facts rather than theories. Our beliefs might be counter-intuitive, but they are true. Tariffs and trade barriers always and everywhere serve to damage economic growth.
We last found that out in the Smoot-Hawley era, and the results were so cataclysmic that we built the post-war order around avoiding any repetition. In the decades that followed the Bretton-Woods agreement, and the creation of GATT and then the WTO, people were prepared to support globalization because they could see that it worked, even if they did not understand why.
We are, it seems, about to experience the alternative: the poverty that follows from attempts at self-sufficiency. Once again, it will be a painful lesson to learn.
Lord Dan Hannan
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a writer and a Conservative Member of the House of Lords
Lorenzo Montanari
Lorenzo Montanari, is Vice President of International Affairs at the Tholos Foundation and Executive Director of its sister organization the Property Rights Alliance (PRA). The flagship publication from PRA is the annual International Property Rights Index, an international comparative study focused on intellectual and physical property rights. Previously, he worked for a public affairs firm and at the international department of the GSPM/George Washington University in Washington, DC and as a political analyst and electoral observer in Latin America. Lorenzo holds a BA in Political Science and in International Relations from the University of Bologna and MA in Political Management from the George Washington University. He collaborates with The Daily Caller and Forbes.
Philip Thompson
Philip Thompson is a Policy Analyst at the Tholos Foundation specializing in international intellectual property legislation and trade policy, in addition, Philip supports the International Property Rights Index, an annual publication of Tholos through its sister organization the Property Rights Alliance. Before joining Tholos, Philip was an associate at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s foreign affairs task force and at the Cato Institute’s trade policy center. Before entering the DC policy world Philip coordinated youth community development programs in the U.S. and the Caribbean for several years. He holds a BA in International Conflict and Resolution and an MA in International Commerce and Policy, both from George Mason University.