Updated WTO-IMF TPA Index shows continued rise in global trade policy activity

The index shows that facilitating measures - those that ease trade by reducing barriers or improving customs procedures - have lost relative momentum in recent years (with an exception during the Strait of Hormuz crisis, where they represent over two-thirds of all measures taken) while other trade measures, including restrictive ones, have pulled ahead, with the 2025 surge extending well beyond the largest economies. Understanding these shifts is increasingly important, as trade policy plays a growing role in shaping global supply chains, economic resilience and geopolitical dynamics.

This news item presents an update of the WTO-IMF Trade Policy Activity (TPA) Index, now extended through May 2026. The Index, developed in joint research by WTO and IMF economists, draws on a wide range of information on trade policy measures across a large number of economies and products. The underlying paper (Centorrino et al. 2025), recently summarized here, explains the methodology and sets out a framework for regular updates.

The Index captures global trade policy dynamics since the Global Financial Crisis in a timely and comprehensive way, at monthly frequency. It treats records of a wide range of policy measures as imperfect signals of global trade policy activity and, using a Dynamic Factor Model, extracts their common dynamics. By tracking actual policy changes by governments, it complements existing broader indicators of trade policy uncertainty and geopolitical risk. The data draw primarily on two complementary trade policy monitoring sources: the WTO's own Trade Monitoring Database (TMDB) and the  Global Trade Alert (GTA).

Figure 1 shows that trade policy activity rose gradually for over a decade before accelerating from around 2020 onwards, reflecting heightened use of trade policy for broader objectives, such as industrial policy or security. Distinct peaks are visible around the escalation of US-China tariffs (2018-19), the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), the war in Ukraine (2022), and renewed trade tensions (2025), with trade policy activity remaining high and on an upward trend over the years between. The updated data extend this picture through mid-2026 and show that the 2025 surge has continued.

The index continued to climb to a new high for the series in early 2026, the most pronounced since the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, when data collection began. Averaged over January-May 2026, global trade policy activity ran nearly twice its 2024 level, and about a quarter above its 2025 average, pointing to a marked intensification of trade policy activity globally.

Figure 2 decomposes the Index by measure category, distinguishing facilitating measures from other measures and further separating the latter into strictly restrictive measures - following Deardorff (2014), such as tariff increases, import bans, and quantitative restrictions - and remaining other measures, composed mostly of subsidies.

The decomposition shows that the recent rise in activity is driven predominantly by restrictive measures, which have climbed the most steeply of any category through 2025 and into 2026. Together with a more gradual but steady increase in subsidies and remaining other measures, this contributed to the overall acceleration in non-facilitating measures in the latest period. Facilitating measures, by contrast, accelerate more modestly, extending the divergence between policies that restrict trade and those that ease it that the index first registered in 2025.

Importantly, the rise in trade policy activity is not driven by the largest economies alone: while the most pronounced peaks tend to appear among G20 economies, the upward movement is broad-based, with non-G20 economies also rising markedly in the most recent period (see the working paper).

The TPA Index can also support real-time trade policy monitoring to gauge the direction of policy activity. An exploratory nowcasting exercise applies a MIDAS mixed-frequency model (see here), combining monthly indicators, such as commodity prices and uncertainty indices, with weekly text-based measures from Google Trends to produce one-step-ahead nowcasts of the TPA Index.

Figure 3 presents the nowcast through June 2026, pointing to a further potential increase in trade policy activity despite some slowing earlier this year. While preliminary and subject to further testing and extension, the exercise illustrates the potential of the TPA Index as a timely monitoring tool for global trade policy.

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