An Explanation of Administrative Barriers
- There are many strategies that can be used to create barriers to trade using less obvious methods than tariffs, quotas and subsidies
- Health and safety regulations e.g. in 2017 the EU put a new health regulation in place regarding the permitted level of aflotoxins in nuts. Aflotoxin levels are naturally higher in southern hemisphere countries and it effectively blocked the import of southern hemisphere nuts
- Product specifications e.g. Canada specified that all jam imported into Canada needed to be in a certain size of the jar. Many countries do not usually manufacture jars in the required size
- Environmental regulations e.g. in November 2021 new regulations were put in place in the EU and the USA to limit the amount of imports of 'dirty steel' - predominantly this is steel produced using coal-fired power stations which are prevalent in China
- Product labelling can be expensive for firms to apply and may limit their desire to sell into certain markets
- Inefficient administrative systems e.g. many border crossings in Africa still require physical paper copies to be submitted at each crossing with some companies claiming they have to provide in excess of 10,000 documents for a single journey
