The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become deeper over time, often encompassing a set of disciplines that go beyond traditional trade policy such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the policy and theory literature, a prominent argument why countries sign "deep" PTAs is to promote and facilitate the operation of Global Value Chains (GVCs). This paper exploits a new dataset on the content of PTAs and data on trade in value added and in parts and components to quantify the impact of deep trade agreements on bilateral cross-border production linkages. Results show that the positive impact of deep trade agreements on GVC integration is driven by value added trade in intermediate rather than in final goods and services. Adding a policy area to a PTA increases domestic value added of intermediates (forward GVC linkages) and foreign value added of intermediates (backward GVC linkages) by 0.48 and 0.38 percent, respectively. At the sectoral level, the positive impact of deep PTAs is higher for higher value-added services suggesting that deep agreements help countries to integrate in industries with higher levels of value added. On a larger sample of countries and years, results confirm that adding a provision to a PTA increases bilateral trade in parts and components by 0.3 percent. The content of PTAs also matters for GVC integration, but the impact varies by income group. Provisions outside the current WTO mandate (e.g. investment, competition policy) drive the effect of deep PTAs on value added trade and on North-South trade in parts and components. Provisions under the current WTO mandate (e.g. tariff reduction, customs facilitation) drive the effect of deep PTAs on South-South trade in parts and components.

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.

Although pre‐1990s preferential trade agreements focused mostly on tariff liberalization, recent agreements increasingly contain deep provisions in diverse areas, such as intellectual property rights, investment and standards. At the same time, there has been a remarkable increase in the internationalization of production through foreign direct investment and outsourcing. This paper studies how deep trade agreements affect the international organization of production. Using new measures of the depth and content of preferential trade agreements and of vertical foreign direct investment, the analysis finds evidence that the depth of trade agreements is correlated with vertical foreign direct investment. Furthermore, this relationship is driven by the provisions that improve the contractibility of inputs provided by suppliers, such as standards, while provisions that increase the contractibility of headquarter services, such as intellectual property rights and investment protection, are generally negatively correlated with foreign investment. This finding is consistent with the so‐called “property rights” theory of the multinational firm according to which improving the contractibility of an input reduces the importance of giving incentives through ownership.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.