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Trade Intelligence · Library

Trade intelligence is AJG's native vertical — the platform was built to be a trade-intelligence platform first, with all other verticals oriented around it. The framing is multilateral by design (SO #13): every trade question we answer is anchored against the 197 countries, 273 FTAs, 28 trade blocs, and 37 trade corridors that constitute the global trading system. The bilateral framing common in trade-policy commentary ("US-China trade war", "India-EU FTA") is often a useful headline but rarely the analytical unit; multilateral framing recovers the substitution patterns, the third-country effects, and the regulatory-overlap dynamics that bilateral framing hides.\n\nThe data infrastructure is multi-layered. UN Comtrade is the foundational source — the world's largest database of merchandise trade, with monthly and annual statistics from 200+ reporting countries since 1962. WTO's World Tariff Profiles, the World Bank's WITS interface, the OECD's TiVA (Trade in Value Added) and BTDIxE (Bilateral Trade Database by Industry and End-use) are the analytical layers built on top. CEPII's BACI (cleaned-and-reconciled bilateral trade), the WIOD (World Input-Output Database), and the GTAP database serve the academic-modelling community. India's DGCI&S, Ministry of Commerce DGCFT, and Customs CBIC are the national sources; the GST Network and ICEGATE provide the modern digital-customs infrastructure.\n\nTariff intelligence is the operational core for any working exporter or importer. The Harmonized System (HS, WCO, 6-digit international + national 8-or-10-digit) is the universal product classification used in 200+ countries; the WTO's Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) bound and applied tariff schedules; the FTA preferential-tariff schedules (which can be 0% for FTA-eligible goods vs 10-30% MFN for non-eligible); the rules-of-origin tests that determine FTA eligibility (which often have changed-tariff-heading, value-content, or technical-process rules that an exporter has to evidence with certificates of origin). India's tariff structure has a typical applied MFN average around 15% but with very wide dispersion — agricultural products often 30-100%, automobiles 60-100%, while inputs for export-promotion schemes can be near zero. The GST + IGST + customs duty stack has to be modelled together for actual landed-cost calculation; AJG's 33-chip global-data mega-section is built around exactly this kind of stack-aware view.\n\nTrade defence — anti-dumping, countervailing-duty, and safeguard measures — is the contested layer where the most active policy is happening. India is the most-frequent user of anti-dumping in the WTO system (1,200+ initiations since 1995, primarily against Chinese imports); the US Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports (USD 370+ billion of trade, 25% additional duty most lines, in force from 2018, modified through 2024); the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM, full implementation from 2026, covering steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity, hydrogen) is the new frontier. The WTO Dispute Settlement Body has been partially paralysed by US blocking of Appellate Body appointments since 2019; the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA, 53 members at last count) is the workaround.\n\nFTA architecture is denser than commentary suggests. The 273 FTAs in force include the EU's 50+ bilateral agreements, the CPTPP (12 members, originally TPP-without-US, expanded with UK 2024), RCEP (15 members covering 30% of world GDP, in force 2022 partially), USMCA (the renegotiated NAFTA), AfCFTA (54 members, ratifications progressing through 2024-2025), the Pacific Alliance, MERCOSUR, ASEAN-internal and ASEAN-plus-One, the EU-Korea-FTA-template, India's expanding bilateral portfolio (Sri Lanka, Singapore, Korea, Japan, ASEAN, UAE, Australia, EFTA, with EU-FTA and Oman-FTA in active negotiation 2024-2025).\n\nNon-tariff measures (NTMs) are now larger than tariff barriers in welfare-cost terms per most modelling exercises. SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary), TBT (technical barriers to trade), customs procedures, certification requirements, and pre-shipment-inspection rules collectively impose 5-20% ad-valorem-equivalent costs that are often invisible to users. The UNCTAD-WTO TRAINS database catalogues NTMs systematically; the OECD STRI (Services Trade Restrictiveness Index) does the parallel for services trade.\n\nThe AJG view treats trade-intelligence as the connective tissue between the country, city, sector, and bloc-level entities the platform tracks. Every multilateral trade flow is a corridor; every corridor is a stack of HS-classified products plus services modes; every product is a tariff-and-NTM lattice that resolves differently against each FTA the exporting country has signed. We model that. We never simplify it away.