IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rau/journl/v10y2015i2p9-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Race For Preferential Trade Agreements –Causes, Patterns And Effects

Author

Listed:
  • Agnes GHIBUŢIU

    (Institute for World Economy of the Romanian Academy)

Abstract

Over the last decade, members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have increasingly turned towards negotiating preferential trade agreements (PTAs) as a means for achieving improved market access for exports of goods and services, and investment. In particular, the year 2013 witnessed a remarkable revival of the regional trade agenda, with numerous new PTA negotiations being launched, including by WTO members accounting for substantial shares of world GDP and global trade and investmen – the so-called ”mega-PTAs”. While PTAs are not new to the WTO system, striking is however the fresh impetus to regionalism worldwide, which manifests itself not only in the steep numerical rise, but also the unprecedented pace and scale of new PTA initiatives. Against this backdrop, this paper addresses several key issues related to the new active phase of regionalism from the perspective of the multilateral trading system governed by the WTO. It first looks at the systemic factors underlying the unabated drive towards PTAs among WTO membership, and distils the rationale behind the current surge in regionalism. Second, it examines the patterns of new PTAs and evidences the qualitative differences vis-à-vis previous PTAs in terms of scope, composition and depth. Finally, it discusses the economic and geopolitical factors driving the new PTAs, and highlights some of the potential effects upon the world trading system and global trade patterns.

Suggested Citation

  • Agnes GHIBUŢIU, 2015. "The Race For Preferential Trade Agreements –Causes, Patterns And Effects," Romanian Economic Business Review, Romanian-American University, vol. 10(2), pages 9-28, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:rau:journl:v:10:y:2015:i:2:p:9-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rebe.rau.ro/RePEc/rau/journl/SU15/REBE-SU15-A1.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Henrik Horn & Petros C. Mavroidis & André Sapir, 2010. "Beyond the WTO? An Anatomy of EU and US Preferential Trade Agreements," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(11), pages 1565-1588, November.
    2. Arvind Subramanian & Martin Kessler, 2013. "The Hyperglobalization of Trade and Its Future," Working Paper Series WP13-6, Peterson Institute for International Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bureau, Christophe & Guimbard, Houssein & Jean, Sebastien, 2016. "What Has Been Left to Multilateralism to Negotiate On?," Conference papers 332753, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    2. Agnes Ghibutiu, 2015. "The Revival of Trade Regionalism: Determinants, Patterns and Implications," Knowledge Horizons - Economics, Faculty of Finance, Banking and Accountancy Bucharest,"Dimitrie Cantemir" Christian University Bucharest, vol. 7(2), pages 9-14, June.
    3. Jean-Christophe Bureau & Houssein Guimbard & Sébastien Jean, 2019. "Competing liberalizations: tariffs and trade in the twenty-first century," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 155(4), pages 707-753, November.
    4. Bernard M. Hoekman & Aaditya Mattoo, 2013. "Liberalizing Trade in Services: Lessons from Regional and WTO Negotiations," RSCAS Working Papers 2013/34, European University Institute.
    5. Erik Figueiredo & Luiz Renato Lima & Gianluca Orefice, 2016. "Migration and Regional Trade Agreements: A (New) Gravity Estimation," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(1), pages 99-125, February.
    6. Gianluca Orefice, 2017. "Non-Tariff Measures, Specific Trade Concerns and Tariff Reduction," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(9), pages 1807-1835, September.
    7. Li, Yilin & Chen, Bin & Li, Chaohui & Li, Zhi & Chen, Guoqian, 2020. "Energy perspective of Sino-US trade imbalance in global supply chains," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    8. Maurice Obstfeld, 2020. "Globalization Cycles," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 6(1), pages 1-12, March.
    9. Kenneth Baltzer, 2015. "Institutional and policy adjustments to implement Free Trade Agreements with the European Union: A developing country perspective," WIDER Working Paper Series 127, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    10. repec:ilo:ilowps:470016 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Henrik Horn & Petros C. Mavroidis, 2014. "Multilateral environmental agreements in the WTO: Silence speaks volumes," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 10(1), pages 147-166, March.
    12. Kox, Henk L.M. & Rojas Romasgosa, Hugo, 2019. "Gravity estimations with FDI bilateral data: Potential FDI effects of deep preferential trade agreements," MPRA Paper 96318, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Alberto Osnago & Nadia Rocha & Michele Ruta, 2019. "Deep trade agreements and vertical FDI: The devil is in the details," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 52(4), pages 1558-1599, November.
    14. Wen Yue & Qingxia Lin & Siyu Xu, 2023. "Investment effect of regional trade agreements: an analysis from the perspective of heterogeneous agreement provisions," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-13, December.
    15. Jean Mercenier & Ebru Voyvoda, 2018. "On Barriers to Technology Adoption, Appropriate Technology and Deep Integration (with implications for the European Union)," ERC Working Papers 1806, ERC - Economic Research Center, Middle East Technical University, revised Apr 2018.
    16. Patricia Garcia-Duran & Montserrat Millet, 2015. "Efficient multilateralism or bilateralism? The TTIP from an EU Trade Policy perspective," UB School of Economics Working Papers 2015/321, University of Barcelona School of Economics.
    17. Piet Eeckhout, 2022. "Brexit Sovereignty and its Dead Ends," Global Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 13(S2), pages 98-105, April.
    18. Julián Tole Martínez, 2019. "Colombia entre los TLC y la OMC: ¿liberación o administración del comercio internacional?," Books, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, number 1139, August.
    19. Risti Permani, 2021. "FTA, Exchange rate pass‐through and export price behavior – Lessons from the Australian dairy sector," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 65(1), pages 192-221, January.
    20. Nguyen Bich Ngoc & Luu Hai Dang & Ngo Thi Tuyet Mai & Nguyen Thi Thuy Hong & Do Thi Huong & Tran Hoang Ha, 2024. "Heterogeneous trade effects of technical non‐tariff measures: Vietnamese agricultural imports," Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, The Crawford School, The Australian National University, vol. 38(1), pages 131-144, May.
    21. Chakraborty, Debashis & Maheshwari, Sourabh & Parashar, Sushil, 2018. "Recent US-China Tariff War: Opportunities for Indian Pharmaceutical Exports?," MPRA Paper 89643, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rau:journl:v:10:y:2015:i:2:p:9-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alex Tabusca (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ferauro.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.