Non-Tariff Barriers

FTA / RoO

Trade barriers other than tariffs — standards, regulations, customs procedures, licensing requirements, SPS measures.

Sources

1. World Trade Organization — Glossary: a guide to “WTO speak” wto.org accessed 23 September 2026

The WTO glossary treats the two common labels as interchangeable and says so explicitly. NTBs are “non-tariff barriers, such as quotas, import licensing systems, sanitary regulations, prohibitions, etc.”, and the entry closes “Same as ‘non-tariff measures’”; the NTM entry says the same in reverse. The difference in usage is one of tone rather than definition — “barrier” presumes obstruction, “measure” does not — which matters because many of the things on the list are legitimate regulation. A sanitary regulation is a non-tariff measure whether or not it is protectionist, and whether a given measure is a barrier is a conclusion about its design and application, not something the category settles in advance.

What a glossary settles, and what it does not. The WTO’s glossary is the organisation’s own plain-language guide to its vocabulary, so it is authoritative for what the term means in WTO usage. It is not the legal text. Where an obligation is at stake, the operative words are in the agreement the glossary points to — GATT, GATS, TRIPS and the rest — and those are what a panel would read. Use the glossary to know what is being discussed, and the agreement to know what is owed.

Related terms

• Absorption Principle
• Bilateral Cumulation
• Certificate of Origin
• Change in Tariff Classification
• Cumulation
• Diagonal Cumulation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).