The Ties between the World Trade Organization and Preferential Trade Agreements: A Textual Analysis

Allee, Todd; Elsig, Manfred; Lugg, Andrew

doi:10.1093/jiel/jgx009

Cited by 46 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…Our findings provide some important evidence that CETA is indeed more forward-looking than backward-looking. Relatively little of its treaty text is recycled from past trade agreements, and neither side dominates overall when past language is employed, as was the case with the TPP where the US had most influence over the treaty texts (Allee, Elsig and Lugg, 2017). Content is particularly unique in new areas of trade regulation, where the EU imprint is surprisingly low.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the European Union Trade Deal with Canada New or Recycled? A Text‐as‐data Approach

2017

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Are the rules in the Canada‐European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) largely copied from past trade agreements, or are they new and potentially groundbreaking? Some critics charge that CETA merely replicates the failures of past trade deals, while others worry that CETA is specifying new ‘behind the border’ rules that threaten state sovereignty. Using text analysis we compare the contents in CETA to those in previous trade agreements signed by both parties. Unlike many other recent trade deals, we find that much of the content in CETA is indeed novel. On average only about 7 per cent of CETA language is copied directly from any of the 49 previous trade agreements we analyze. This same pattern holds across many of the most controversial issue areas, like investment. Some recent agreements like EU‐Singapore (30%) and Canada‐South Korea (24%) are replicated in part in CETA, although recycled text is more likely to come from past Canadian PTAs than EU ones. Our results suggest that fears that CETA is ‘more of the same’ are overblown and indicate that if ratified CETA likely will play an important role as a model in future trade agreements.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the European Union Trade Deal with Canada New or Recycled? A Text‐as‐data Approach

2017

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“…To the contrary, empirical research finds that ‘average levels of protection have continued to fall throughout the post‐1995 period’ (Elsig et al, 2017, p. 22) and that PTAs had a positive impact on trade flows (Dür et al, 2014). These developments reflect the strong and widespread ‘presence’ of the WTO in PTAs (Allee et al, 2017, see also Kim and Manger, 2017).…”

Section: From Geneva To Doha: Towards a Regime Complex For Internatiomentioning

confidence: 91%

“…This theoretical contribution complements the rich and detailed empirical literature on the proliferation of PTAs (Baccini, 2019; Dür et al, 2014; Dür and Elsig, 2015). This literature found that PTAs are carefully adapted to work with and to expand multilateral WTO rules (Allee et al, 2017; Kim and Manger, 2017). At the same time, it has yet to put these findings in a larger theoretical context.…”

Section: How the Rise Of Preferential Trading Agreements Transforms Gmentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking Gridlock: How Path Dependent Layering Enhances Resilience in Global Trade Governance

Faude

2020

Global Policy

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What are the implications of the proliferating preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for the liberal trade order? Many scholars and practitioners see large increases in PTAs as a destabilizing factor that undermines core features of the postwar international trade system. By contrast, this paper argues that the accelerated growth of PTAs since the mid-1990s enhances the resilience of the liberal trade order. PTAs increase the ability of the order to accommodate heterogeneous preferences and distributive conflicts. They represent a continuation of a longer path of liberalization set in motion by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This path-dependent development created conditions for a gradual expansion of the membership and the regulatory scope of the GATT/WTO system, but also heightened levels of preference heterogeneity and distributive conflicts. By enabling groups of states with homogenous preferences to layer new rules on top of the multilateral GATT/WTO system, PTAs enable the continuation of the liberalization path. Consequently, PTAs have served as complements rather than to undermine the WTO. Policy Implications • Layering offers a promising way to break gridlock in major international institutions. Especially given high levels of preference heterogeneity in a globalized world, decision-makers should realize its potential to put in place workable governance solutions in the absence of consensus.

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“…Trade treaties are not negotiated from scratch. Individual variations notwithstanding, PTAs are highly standardized documents that incorporate boilerplate language and often follow a template or political mandate across multiple negotiations (Allee et al ). As a result, trade agreements often share a degree of similarity.…”

Section: Text‐as‐data Analysis With Totamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the same vein, ToTA enables political scientists to better understand treaty design determinants. Existing studies have revealed that large portions of trade agreements have been copied and pasted from other texts (e.g., Allee & Lugg ; Allee et al ). ToTA allows scholars to conduct similar analyses on a larger scale.…”

Section: Tota and Pta Design Research In Economics Political Sciementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Alschner¹,

Seiermann²,

Skougarevskiy³

2018

J Empirical Legal Studies

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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.

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The Ties between the World Trade Organization and Preferential Trade Agreements: A Textual Analysis

Cited by 46 publications

References 0 publications

Is the European Union Trade Deal with Canada New or Recycled? A Text‐as‐data Approach

Is the European Union Trade Deal with Canada New or Recycled? A Text‐as‐data Approach

Breaking Gridlock: How Path Dependent Layering Enhances Resilience in Global Trade Governance

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

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