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The Content of Preferential Trade Agreements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2018

CLAUDIA HOFMANN ,
ALBERTO OSNAGO  and
MICHELE RUTA
CLAUDIA HOFMANN
Affiliation:
Former advisor Batalla Abogados, Costa Rica
ALBERTO OSNAGO*
Affiliation:
World Trade Organization, Switzerland
MICHELE RUTA
Affiliation:
The World Bank, USA
*
*Email: alberto.osnago@wto.org.
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Abstract

Preferential trade agreements are an important feature of the global trade system. Several questions, ranging from the rationale for preferential arrangements to their impact on members, non-members and the broader multilateral trade system, are at the forefront of academic and policy debates in trade policy. This paper presents a new database that offers a detailed assessment of the content of preferential arrangements, examining the coverage and legal enforceability of provisions regulating a large set of policy areas. The database provides information on 279 agreements signed by 189 countries between 1958 and 2015. The analysis of the data confirms one of the key insights in the literature: preferential trade agreements are becoming deeper over time. A growing number of these treaties regulate an extended set of policies, frequently with legally enforceable provisions, in areas under the current World Trade Organization mandate and in areas outside the current World Trade Organization mandate, especially competition policy, investment, movements of capital, and intellectual property rights protection. Accounting for the changing scope of preferential trade agreements is essential to gain a more complete and accurate understanding of where the global trading system is going and how its governance can be improved.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Trade Review , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 365 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Claudia Hofmann et al. 2018 

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Footnotes

An extended version of this paper was circulated as Hofmann et al. (2017) with the title ‘Horizontal Depth: A New Database on the Content of Preferential Trade Agreements’. We are grateful to our legal consultants on this project, the law firm Batalla, and particularly Priscilla Ortiz for the excellent work in coding the preferential trade agreements. We would like to thank two anonymous referees, Rohini Acharya, Ana Cristina Molina, Alen Mulabdic, Robert Teh, Alan Winters (the Editor), and seminar participants at Stanford University, the World Bank, and EIEF (Rome) for comments on an earlier draft. Errors and omissions are our responsibility only.

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