Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
48
Three will be used here: prevalence (the average number of standards per product); frequency (the
percentage of product lines in a sector that are affected by SPS measures or TBTs); and coverage (the
percentage of imports by value exposed to SPS measures or TBTs). The EU is taken as a representative
example of an extra-regional partner that is an important market for many OIC member states. For the
analysis of intra-OIC barriers, Nigeria will be taken as a representative member of the African group, and
Pakistan will be taken as a representative member of the Asian group; the dataset does not include
information on most OIC member states, and in particular does not cover any member of the Arab group.
The second database comes from the WTO, and records Specific Trade Concerns (STCs) raised by
members in relation to the import regimes of other members. The SPS and TBT Agreements both allow
affected countries to notify STCs to the relevant committee when they perceive that they have been
negatively affected by an SPS measure or TBT implemented by a trading partner, and believe it may not
be justified under WTO rules. The aim of this procedure is to facilitate negotiation and compromise
among members, so that SPS and TBT issues can be resolved at an early stage, without the need for
lengthy and costly dispute settlement procedures. Analyzing STCs is viewed in the research community
as a better way of identifying SPS measures and TBTs that potentially act as barriers to trade than
simply counting SPS and TBT notifications by importing countries. The reason is that limiting
consideration to STCs focuses attention on measures perceived as burdensome by exporting countries.
Examining SPS and TBT notifications also suffers from the problem that countries are very inconsistent
in terms of reporting practices: some issue large numbers of notifications every year, whereas others do
not notify any measures. The difference in behaviors is not purely due to substantive differences in
regulatory practice, but also to different approaches to WTO compliance, and different perceptions of
what the notification obligations mean in practice.
In addition to specificity in terms of data sources used and countries covered, it is also important to
focus the analysis on sectors of particular importance; it is not possible in a document of this length to
cover all sectors. When necessary, this section therefore focuses on the five highest value exports of each
of the three OIC regional groups, as measured at the two digit level of the harmonized system (2014 data
from UN COMTRADE via WITS).
5.1 Extra-OIC Trade
To begin the analysis, data from NTM Map make it possible to examine the incidence of SPS measures
and TBTs on key export products of OIC member states, using the EU to provide an indication of
conditions in a large, developed market. The starting point is a consideration of the frequency of these
two measures, i.e the percentage of six digit product lines that is affected by measures in each two-digit
sectors. Results are in Figures 7-9, taking each OIC regional group separately.