Regional Trade Agreements have emerged in an environment of stalled multilateral trade negotiations. Although the impact of Regional Trade Agreements on international trade has been well documented, scant attention has been paid to empirical studies exploring their heterogeneity from the point of view of deep integration. We set out to determine whether deeper Regional Trade Agreements promote trade more effectively than less ambitious ones. We generate credible deep integration indicators using two recently available datasets from the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Institute. We then test the effect of depth on trade using a gravity model. We treat additive indicators as factor variables and use multiple correspondence analysis to obtain distilled indicators of deep integration to offer new insights and confirm recent deep integration findings. We find that deeper Regional Trade Agreements increase trade more than shallow agreements do, irrespective of whether the provisions they contain are within or beyond the competence of the World Trade Organization. JEL Classifications: F13, F14, F15, F53

Export processing zones (EPZs) have become widespread with the liberalisation of international trade and investment. They are key players in the deepening of the global value chain (GVC). However, little is known about their contribution to world trade due to a lack of information on their location and status. This paper sets out to improve knowledge in this area by analysing the trade performance of EPZ countries at macro‐level with a focus on EPZ externalities and distortive costs. We have built an original database of EPZs in which we define them as processing zones benefiting from import tariff incentives. We show that EPZs increase trade only by easing the negative impact of protection. As importers of components and raw materials, they raise the rest of the world's exports. This confirms the contribution of EPZs to the GVC. This result is robust to a change in the model specification, errors and bias due to data collection issues and sample composition.

Le multilatéralisme commercial établi après la Seconde Guerre mondiale avait pour objectif de prévenir les guerres commerciales. La création de l’Organisation mondiale du commerce en 1995 et la mise en place de son mécanisme de règlement des différends ont renforcé ce multilatéralisme. Aujourd’hui, Donald Trump multiplie les mesures protectionnistes et cherche à réduire l’OMC à l’impuissance. L’issue de la guerre commerciale actuelle est bien incertaine.

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Abstract. While the WTO and Doha Development Round do not deal with labour issues – they leave this to the ILO – the main countries that conclude free trade agreements incorporate labour provisions, which vary in terms of stringency. Sanctions are rarely used, and fears that “social clauses” would serve protectionist purposes have proved to be unfounded. Labour provisions are designed to meet a variety of sometimes conflicting goals, by means of different mechanisms aimed at improving labour practices and promoting Decent Work; the author makes a number of suggestions in this regard.

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Résumé Les bonnes institutions favorisent-elles le commerce ? De nombreux accords commerciaux, au premier rang desquels, l’Union européenne, introduisent des clauses institutionnelles en plus des dispositions strictement commerciales. Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à l’influence de la démocratie et de la lutte contre la corruption sur le commerce. Nous utilisons un modèle de gravité, inspiré de Anderson et van Wincoop (2003) mais estimé par la méthode du pseudo maximum de vraisemblance à partir d’une loi de Poisson, ce qui évite les biais d’hétéroscédasticité inhérents aux estimateurs des moindres carrés ordinaires. Nous analysons les effets de la similarité des institutions sur le commerce bilatéral, puis nous régressons les effets fixes pays pour tester les effets de la démocratie et de la lutte contre la corruption sur le commerce pour l’ensemble des pays. Nos résultats montrent que les pays démocratiques sont plus ouverts mais que deux pays démocratiques n’échangent pas davantage entre eux. C’est l’inverse qui est constaté pour la corruption. Classification JEL  : F15 ; F17 ; P33 ; P37 ; P48.

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