ABSTRACT
One way to indicate the differential effects of Australian protection on its various trading partners is to construct weighted averages of the nominal rates of protection applying to the various commodities, with the commodity weights used for each trading partner reflecting the share of the commodity concerned in Australia's total imports from that country. The impact of a country's protection on its imports from particular trading partners depends not only on the rates of protection it applies to the commodities exported by those trading partners, but also on the degree to which its imports of those commodities respond to protection. The estimated indices of discrimination reveal that the incidence of Australia's protection has shifted towards the ASEAN countries as a group relative to Australia's other trading partners. The effect on imports for ASEAN of reducing protection on individual commodities varies widely. Even the signs of these effects vary.
