The Barriers Behind the Border
Not all trade barriers are created equal. The ones that matter most do not sit at the border. They sit inside markets, shaping who can compete—and who cannot—before competition even begins.
The recently released 2026 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (NTE) catalogs foreign barriers to U.S. exports, foreign direct investment, and electronic commerce, country by country. It is a long document, and it invites a superficial reading as a grab bag of discrete complaints.
That reading misses the point. Some barriers frustrate but remain manageable. Others matter more. They reshape entire markets, steering outcomes away from competition on the merits. Those are the barriers the United States should prioritize. They impose the greatest economic costs and offer the greatest gains if negotiated away.
This is where Shanker Singham’s framework for anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs) proves useful. The problem is not simply that governments block imports at the border. It is that they skew domestic markets through favoritism, discriminatory regulation, weak property-rights protections, or state-backed commercial privilege. In Singham’s Growth Commission white paper, ACMDs fall into three pillars: domestic competition, international competition, and property rights.
This post applies Singham’s framework to five major jurisdictions—China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, and Mexico—where ACMDs documented in the NTE impose significant economic harm.