Due to the achievements of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1947, the custom tariffs have been significantly reduced through eight rounds of multilateral trade negotiations. During the application of GATT 1947, the non-tariff barriers have been perceived as an obstacle to international trade and some of them have been regulated by this Agreement. However, some of the non-tariff barriers are still present today, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) serves as a guardian of the global trade regime. The remaining non-tariff barriers which were not regulated by WTO rules include administrative trade barriers and, at some extent, technical barriers to trade.
In the processes of regional trade liberalisation, their members tend to go into deeper trade integration and eliminate more instruments that obstruct the trade, in particular non-tariff barriers, compared to the WTO regime. However, in the revised Central European Free Trade Agreement from 2006 (CEFTA 2006), there is still high presence of non-tariff barriers. These barriers are different then barriers applied in trade with the most important partners, such as European Union. This paper focus on the applied non-tariff measures in the intraregional trade and explore the differences with regards to the measures applied by the EU trade regime, which would be relevant for CEFTA 2006 economies in the future. Since CEFTA 2006 is sub-regional trade integration, and all members have aspirations for EU membership, the different stages of their EU integration processes create additional non-tariff obstacles to intraregional CEFTA 2006 trade.