GTA Coverage & Scope

Which Governments We Track, and How Fast

GTA does not aim for a global census. Coverage concentrates on the economies that account for most of world trade: a defined, analyst-assigned set of around 60 economies tracked as a standing priority, not every country that exists. An economy without an assigned analyst is not actively monitored; that is also how economies covered in earlier years have left active coverage.

Coverage is not one speed for every economy. Reporting follows a tiered schedule: the highest-priority economies are typically reported within a week, the next tier within 30 days, the next within three months, and the remainder on an ad hoc basis. The heavier a government's trade-policy activity and the larger its weight in world trade, the more analyst attention it gets and the faster its measures reach the database.

Every jurisdiction name in GTA follows the United Nations Statistics Office's official naming, so a search for a country returns the same result a UN trade statistician would expect. Before any record is published, it clears a two-stage human review: an initial pass, then a five-gate check on structure, content, style, sourcing, and consistency with the rest of the database.

Every Policy Lever We Track

GTA tracks 83 named policy-instrument types in total, 77 of them in active use today, organised into 20 instrument groups. Twelve of those groups follow UNCTAD's own non-tariff-measure classification: sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, import monitoring, trade defence (anti-dumping, anti-subsidy, safeguards, special safeguards, anti-circumvention), import licensing and quotas, price controls, finance measures, localisation and local-content requirements, subsidies, government procurement restrictions, intellectual property, and export-related measures. Outside that classification, GTA also tracks import tariffs, capital controls, FDI entry and ownership rules, labour-migration measures, and cases where a government has acted but the mechanism itself is not yet clear.

That range is what lets one search answer questions that would otherwise need five different sources: a tariff change, an export licensing requirement, a subsidy, and a local-content rule on the same product, in the same result.

Anatomy of a GTA Record

Every record starts with a state act: the government announcement itself, dated, sourced, and titled with the implementing jurisdiction named up front. GTA uses the government's own official documentation wherever it exists; where none is available, a record needs at least two independent sources confirming it before it is entered.

A state act contains one or more interventions: the specific instruments the announcement puts in place. Most announcements produce one intervention; a few produce several, when a single announcement bundles distinct instruments, applies at different intensities to different trading partners, or takes effect on a staggered timeline.

Each intervention carries roughly forty fields across three groups. Who acted: the implementing jurisdiction and the level of government behind it (national, subnational, supranational, or a state-owned or multilateral financial institution). What they did: the intervention type, whether the measure affects imports or exports, the GTA evaluation (below), when it took effect and when it ended, which firms it targets (from all companies down to a single named firm), and the products or sectors it covers, coded to the six-digit Harmonised System, the standard customs product classification (over 5,000 product lines) and the UN's three-digit sector classification. Who is affected: the trading partners whose commercial interests change, and whether that partner was identified from trade-flow data, explicitly named in the policy text, explicitly excluded from it, or drawn in only as a side effect of a company's own sourcing decisions.

Not every record qualifies. To enter the database, an action has to be a government's own unilateral choice, not something it negotiated in an agreement; it has to demonstrably favour one competitor over another, not apply economy-wide; and if it is a subsidy or other financial incentive, it has to clear USD 10 million for a general programme or USD 100 million for a scheme limited to small and medium enterprises. Announcements without a credible path to implementation, such as a policy speech with no budget or timeline attached, do not qualify either.

The Direction-of-Change Signal

Every intervention carries one further judgement that most datasets in this space do not make: does it open market access for foreign firms, or close it. GTA calls this the GTA evaluation, and it takes one of three values. Green means the measure liberalises trade without discriminating between domestic and foreign firms. Red means it almost certainly discriminates against foreign commercial interests. Amber means it likely does. For a quick read, green groups as liberalising and red-plus-amber groups as harmful.

This is the field that turns a list of policy actions into a directional signal: not just that a government changed something, but which way it moved market access for the firms that trade with it.

What to Use Alongside GTA

GTA is not the right source for everything, and pairing it with the right dataset for what it leaves out gets you a complete picture faster than trying to make GTA do a job it was not built for.

For technical and sanitary notifications, use WTO ePing or I-TIP. ePing carries the sanitary and technical-barrier notifications GTA deliberately excludes, updated daily from a platform covering notifications back to 1995; I-TIP covers WTO members' formally notified measures. Neither judges direction of change; both are the notification record GTA does not aim to duplicate.

For exchange-rate regimes and capital-account rules, use the IMF's AREAER (its Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions). It is the authoritative annual record across the IMF's entire membership, staff-verified, and it covers ground GTA does not: monetary and exchange-rate policy rather than trade and investment measures.

For the underlying trade-flow numbers, use ITC Trade Map or Trade Data Monitor. Trade Map covers 220-plus countries and territories with the statistics themselves, not a policy reading of them; it is the layer beneath a GTA finding when you need the trade values a measure actually affects.

For the negotiated content of trade agreements, use the World Bank Deep Trade Agreements database. It codes what governments agreed together across some 400 preferential agreements; GTA records what they then do unilaterally, which is close to the mirror image.

For country-risk scores and forecasts, use Oxford Economics. Its risk and macro-forecasting products are the one comparator built to be forward-looking, and the one other dataset in this space with its own AI-assistant integration (MCP) and agent access. It answers "how risky is this market"; GTA answers "what did this government just do, to which product, from which trading partner."

Use GTA for the measures themselves, and reach for the dataset above that matches the question GTA was not built to answer.