The paper seeks to determine how protection of services affects the effective protection of agricultural and manufacturing sectors using a set of recent estimates of services barriers in telecommunication, banking, distribution, electricity, professional services, and air and maritime transport in selected developing and transition economies. Despite data limitations that translate into an underestimation of the taxing effect of services barriers on non-services sectors, this exercise could be important from a practical point of view, given that in a number of agricultural and manufacturing sectors the sign of protection is reversed (i.e. it goes from positive protection into effective taxation). In order to obtain more realistic insights into the potential costs of services barriers on downstream using industries, it is necessary to consider more accurate services tax equivalents as well as additional estimates for all services sectors as soon as they become available.