The emergence of TTBs as the new form of protectionism is one of the most remarkable changes in the international trade system during the past decades. The trend of employing TTBs as effective remedy actions against imports has become exceedingly popular. This study analyzed the determinants of TTBs from two levels. The first level was to examine how factors would influence the use of TTBs in the global and developing countries scenario. The second level was to investigate the main factors that had an impact on the employment of TTBs in the paper and non-paper products scenario.

Methods included two empirical models: the two-step sample selection model to assess determinants of TTBs for the global and developing countries scenario; and the probit regression for the paper and non-paper products scenario.

Research findings in this study were generally in line with our expectations. For instance, a country’s import, export, and employment in agriculture indeed have impacts on its use of TTBs as expected. However, the forest area and forest coverage rate have opposite signs on the use of TTBs, which was not consistent with our expectations. Results showed that forest area had a positive impact on a country’s use of TTBs, whereas forest coverage rate would discourage the employment of trade barriers. On the one hand, a large forest area of a country can reflect a high production ability on the forest products to some extent, which satisfy its domestic demand and encourage the use of TTBs to protect the domestic industry. On the other hand, rather than the production ability that forest area reflects, the forest coverage rate can show the ratio of forest products industry as a whole compared with other industries within the country. To maintain a relationship with other countries, a country with a high forest coverage rate may use fewer TTBs on forest products. Thus, the distribution of forest resources indeed has an impact on countries’ decisions to use trade policies, especially on the forest products industry.

Several factors related to participation and frequencies of using TTBs have potential implications for policymakers. First, the results of determinants on the use of TTBs differed between the global and developing countries. Export had a positive impact on a country’s decision to implement TTBs for the group of developing countries, while it was not significant for the group of global countries in the participation stage. Results suggest that the employment of TTBs will spread among developing countries for the greater liberalization pressure as they would like to improve the ability to use TTBs to counter the trade barriers imposed against them [5]. From 1995 to 2015, a total of 392 cases relevant to 28 economies in the forest products industry were identified. Among them, over 78% belonged to developing countries. However, the largest trade barriers employment country is the developed country of Australia with 43 TTBs cases, and the second-largest petition county is the developed country of the US with 38 cases. Although countries with higher imports may outsource much of their production to foreign countries or need to keep a good connection with them [5,45], retaliation still exists and easily continues among these countries, causing a chain effect on the use of TTBs. Thus, developing countries with large exports would impose TTBs on countries who previously employed trade barriers on them as retaliation, which may ruin the trade gains that liberalization brings rather than the original goal of using TTBs to protect the domestic forest sector.

Second, results showed that countries with large employment in agriculture and GDP per capita would impose more TTBs to protect the domestic forest products industry. As we know, cases of TTBs such as AD and CV are initiated by domestic firms on specific foreign firms. These trade measures are cost-effectively initiated and can be extended without time limitation once approved [5,45]. Under this circumstance, TTBs may be easily misused by those counties with high ability in the production of forest products, such as high employment in agriculture and GDP per capita. Thus, it may cause domestic firms to pay more attention to prove unfair trade actions of foreign exporters rather than improving their efficiencies.

In addition, the patterns of TTBs between paper and non-paper products differed vastly. All significant variables for paper products were covered by three categories of the trade size, economic capability, and geographical environment. However, for non-paper products, only two factors of the forest area and employment in agriculture had impacts on the use of TTBs. From 1995–2015, over 62% of cases of TTBs were based on paper products in the forest products industry. Compared with non-paper products, paper production has a large demand for technology and financial support as well as a high cost of mitigating environmental pollution; while the production of non-paper products such as wooden furniture requires a high input share of raw logs and depends much more on the forest resources than on economic conditions. According to the financial data in the forest sector, the value of most paper firms is larger than those of non-paper firms. For the data limitation, we use an example from the US stock market. Table 5 shows the value of major financial data for selected public paper firms and wooden furniture firms, in which the values of assets and profit in the US paper firms are more than a hundred times than of those of furniture firms. Thus, countries prefer to impose more TTBs on paper products than on non-paper products for economic effectiveness.

In conclusion, the present study first analyzed the participation and frequency of using TTBs in the forest products industry. Research findings have brought policy implications for governments or some policymakers when considering TTBs as a protectionist measure. It provides several insights about patterns that influence trade barriers participation and demand, especially in this competitive global market. However, there are some limitations to this study. First, since the number of countries who employed TTBs in the forest sector is not large enough and cases of TTBs are not evenly distributed by time, a time series analysis has not been conducted in this study. In addition, the scenario of the developed countries is not analyzed due to the data limitation, as only six developed countries employed TTBs in the forest sector. In the future, as it is expected that targeted tariff measures will be used more frequently, we are going to conduct the research on developed countries and a time series analysis after observing more cases of TTBs.