During 2009, the Asian - Pacific economies witnessed the collapse of trade unprecedented in modern economic history. This collapse has been combined with contractions in production and rising unemployment in almost all economies. In their efforts to address these serious challenges, policymakers in many countries opted to use trade restrictions, often but not always, in line with the flexibility left by the multilateral trading rules on the use of contingent measures. The first impression about policy reactions to the crisis has been that many among the trade - related measures, which were enacted, were of a so called non - tariff nature. Because this non - tariff protection lacks precision in terms of definition of instrument, measurability and comparability, among other problems, it is typically deemed to be much more problematic than tariff based protection. In order to bring more clarity on these issues, the ESCAP secretariat has teamed up with WTO and UNCTAD in organizing a research workshop under the title, ―Rising non - tariff protectionism and crisis recovery‖ (14 - 15 December 2009) as part of the MARKHUB workshop series. Researchers from the region, in particular those associated with ARTNeT, as well as experts from outside the region, were called upon to submit their studies on the non - tariff based protectionism affecting developing and the least developed countries of the region...

(ST/ESCAP/2587)