WTO | 2026 News items - Updated WTO-IMF TPA Index shows continued rise in global trade policy activity home wto news 2026 news news item economic research and analysis Updated WTO-IMF TPA Index shows continued rise in global trade policy ac
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Updated WTO-IMF TPA Index shows continued rise in global trade policy activity
A new Trade Policy Activity (TPA) index by WTO and IMF economists shows a marked rise in trade policy activity during 2025-26, alongside heightened trade policy tensions among large economies, against the backdrop of an overall upward trend.
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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 ove
