Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA)—A Structured Corpus for the Text‐as‐Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements

Abstract

With multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in deadlock, rulemaking on international economic governance has shifted to preferential trade agreements (PTAs). To facilitate the scholarly investigation of the fast‐growing universe of PTAs, this article introduces a machine‐readable and structured full text corpus of 448 WTO‐notified trade agreements stored on a Github repository—the Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA) corpus. The article (1) provides a summary analysis of the ToTA corpus, (2) illustrates how text‐as‐data techniques can be used to investigate PTA design using ToTA, including through an interactive website accompanying this research, and (3) concludes with an overview of research applications involving this PTA text corpus in economics, political science, and law. The current codebook is attached herein as an appendix. The dataset, codebook, and code, as updated, are available at https://github.com/mappingtreaties/tota.

Sense and similarity: automating legal text comparison

“…After interpreting the resulting structure depicted in Figure 1.2b we realized that regional clusters of similarly worded treaties characterized the FTA corpus: European states were concluding one type of agreement, while states in America and East Asia were following a different treaty template. This regionalization of FTA language was a structure we "discovered" inductively (Alschner et al, 2018b).…”

Do Greener Trade Agreements Call for Side-Payments?

“…While aid can play an important role, we do not suggest that the supply of aid has a causal effect on the environmental provisions being included in a PTA. This is because of the well-researched practice of high-income countries entering negotiations with developing countries with a pre-defined template of PTA provisions (e.g., Allee et al, 2017; Alschner et al, 2018; Baccini et al, 2015). Recent works by Allee and Elsig (2019) and Peacock et al (2019), for example, point to the fact that most PTA provisions are simply copy-pasted by high-income countries from their previous PTAs.…”

Boilerplate in International Trade Agreements

“…On the utility of the "n-gram" approach see Damashek (1995). A 5-gram specification has also been used in a previous study of PTA text similarity (Alschner, Seiermann and Skougarevskiy 2018). As a robustness check, we also calculated 3-grams (see Appendix C, p. 8).…”

“…New bodies of work on bilateral investment treaties (Alschner and Skougarevskiy 2016;Brown 2013;Poulsen 2014;Vandevelde 1992), the diffusion of regional institutions (Alter 2012;Arnold and Rittberger 2013;Börzel and Risse 2012;Jetschke and Murray 2012;Lenz 2012) and the transplantation of laws (Morin and Gold 2014) acknowledge the growing use of legal models and templates in international relations. Similarly, recent scholarship on the design of trade agreements (Allee and Elsig 2016;Allee, Elsig and Lugg 2017;Alschner, Seiermann and Skougarevskiy 2018;Baccini, Dür and Haftel 2015;Morin, Pauwelyn and Hollway 2017) observes boilerplate in economically important and politically sensitive preferential trade agreements (PTAs), also with regard to provisions on dispute settlement mecha-1 Boilerplate is used in legal literature to describe "standard-form contracts" not subject to negotiation.…”