The Temporary Trade Barriers Database began with the collection of detailed information on the national use of antidumping in 2004. In 2005, I published version 1.0 of the ‘Global Antidumping Database.’ It included highly detailed, case-, product- and firm-level information dating back to the 1980s for more than a dozen countries.

Antidumping quickly became too narrow a name, as I found myself also collecting data on countervailing duties, global safeguards, and the China-specific transitional safeguard. So I called the over-arching set of data on multiple policy instruments the Temporary Trade Barriers Database. Over the years, I expanded the country coverage as I was updating the data, which occurred at different frequencies between 2005 and 2016. During the Great Recession period of 2008-10, I worked to update the data on a quarterly basis. During other periods it was typically updated annually. Data collection funding for the project over the years was graciously provided by Brandeis University and the World Bank. The data has always been made freely available on the Internet.

The last time I updated and published the data was in June 2016, and it contained data through 2015:Q4. I no longer update or maintain the data, but it remains freely available for researchers. If you find the data to be of use, please cite it as

Bown, Chad P. Temporary Trade Barriers Database. The World Bank, June 2016.

Examples of how these data has been used in empirical research