Where the World Is Charging Most Tariffs

The Trump administration's recent move to impose tariffs on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods as well as steel and aluminum imports in general is once again breaking with long-standing U.S. trade policy. Historically, the United States has favored low or no tariffs and the removal of barriers to trade. As of 2022, the U.S. had still applied a weighted average tariff rate of 1.5 percent on its imports according to the World Bank, placing it among the countries with the lowest tariffs worldwide together with European countries. This number might now be slightly higher and the same applies to China and Canada, which have issues retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. this week. In 2019, about halfway through the U.S.-China trade war, U.S. average applied tariff rate had already surged to 7 percent, data from Deutsche Bank suggested then.

The World Bank's tariff rates refer to 2021-2022 data mostly and are weighted by product import shares without taking specific free trade deals into account.

Although most developed countries have been pushing for lower trade barriers in order to foster competitiveness, tariffs continue to be very high in some parts of the world. India, for example, imposed weighted average tariffs of 11.5 percent in 2022 while in China, the rate was 3.1 percent. African countries have some of the highest rates with the Republic of the Congo, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea standing at more than 18 percent. The Solomon Islands is the country with the highest weighted average tariff rate worldwide (20.7 percent).