Volume 15 • Issue 1 • PP: 01–06 • 2027
When Tariff Averages Misrank Markets: A Business Intelligence Audit of WTO 2025 Profiles
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© 2027 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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Procurement teams often rank destination markets using a single published tariff average. Whether that ordering survives a change of measurement is a practical question for business intelligence. We audit the 2025 World Tariff Profiles, retaining 101 economies with matching 2024 most-favoured-nation (MFN) applied tariffs, reported trade-weighted tariffs, and 2023 import totals. A reproducible screen compares simple and trade-weighted averages, ranking changes, duty-free subheading shares, and the share of subheadings facing duties above 15%. The median simple average is 7.5% and the median trade-weighted average is 6.9%; the within-economy weighted-minus-simple median is −0.6 percentage points. Thirty-five economies differ by at least two points. With ties retained at each top-25 cutoff, 28 economies qualify under the simple rate and 26 under the weighted rate, but only 20 qualify under both. Türkiye falls from 17.3% to 7.0%, whereas Dominica rises from 10.7% to 15.9%. Disagreement persists among larger import markets: 13 of 31 economies with at least US$50 billion in 2023 imports have a gap of two points or more. A layered dashboard should therefore trigger product-level verification where aggregate measures disagree. Neither average identifies the duty paid by a particular firm or the effect of changing trade policy.
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