Do Economic Integration Agreements Actually Work? Issues in Understanding the Causes and Consequences of the Growth of Regionalism

This paper argues that the ‘competitive liberalisation’ of national governments of the past several decades has created a ‘market’ for regional economic integration agreements (EIAs). Evidence shows that countries that have selected into EIAs – such as free trade agreements – have ‘chosen well’ in the sense that the same economic characteristics that explain and predict bilateral EIAs also explain and predict bilateral trade flows. We show that previous ex post empirical evaluations of the effects of EIAs on trade have tended to underestimate the effects due to ignoring the (endogenous) self‐selection bias of country pairs into EIAs. Accounting for this bias, we find that European economic integration had a much larger impact on trade over the period 1960–2000 than previously found, and other more recent EIAs have had economically and statistically significant effects on members’ trade. The results shed further light on understanding the causes and consequences of the growth of regionalism.     

Trade Policies in Southeast Asia in the Wider Asian Perspective

This paper takes stock of trade policies in Southeast Asia after the Asian crisis and in the wake of the current global economic crisis. It compares trade policies in individual Southeast Asian countries; places them in the context of regional and global economic integration; and particularly draws implications for the region from the rise of China and India. The first section looks at recent trade and FDI patterns in Southeast Asia. Then follows an overview of key trade‐policy trends, in the region overall and in individual countries. The next sections examine ASEAN countries in international trade negotiations and agreements: first in the WTO, especially in the Doha Round; then within ASEAN; and finally on cross‐regional FTAs. The paper concludes that ASEAN countries cannot rely on external tracks ‘from above’ for meaningful trade policy reform. Since the Asian crisis there has been a slowdown of reform momentum, and too much reliance on trade negotiations – especially FTAs. Rather, countries in the region have to rely on themselves –‘from below’ as it were. The engine of liberalisation and regulatory reform has to be home‐driven – as it was before the Asian crisis – with governments taking unilateral measures in response to internal and external conditions.     

Failure to Deliver: The Investment Effects of US Preferential Economic Agreements

Global trade and investment rules are increasingly determined by bilateral and regional agreements, which are widely expected to increase economic ties between the signatories. Even though the United States is a relative newcomer to these narrower economic agreements, it has signed several different types with dozens of partner countries. These agreements, which often require partners to make costly policy changes, are nonetheless attractive because they provide preferential access to the US market and promise increased inward investment. In this paper, we compare the investment effects of three different types of agreements and find little evidence that existing international agreements (trade and investment framework agreements, bilateral investment treaties or preferential trade agreements) tend to increase investment from the United States. After exploring other potential explanations, we conclude that US treaty partners may have unrealistic expectations for agreements to increase direct investment.     

Comprehensive Trade Agreements: Conditioning Globalisation or Eroding the European Model?

Trade dynamics within the EU are presently pushing it towards deepening globalisation through bilateral comprehensive trade agreements which establish far-reaching rules that govern the bilateral trade relationship. The European Commission has defended these agreements as a vehicle through which to promote world trade in accordance with European values and norms. However, the theory of fiscal federalism and the principle of subsidiarity tell us that one should not centralise decisions at the supranational level which are better taken at the national or regional level when there are different preferences among countries or regions. Consequently, member state and regional competences ought not to be perceived as a mere obstacle to swift trade deals. Rather, they can provide an important checks and balances function with regard to whether EU trade policy is truly working to condition globalisation according to European values and preferences.     

The Relations between the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean

The EU is the second-largest trading partner (after the USA) of the Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC). The European Commission is presently in the process of negotiating association agreements with three Latin American regional trading associations, a result of the fact that the EU has traditionally preferred multilateral treaties to bilateral ones as a means of its international trade policy. These negotiations have proved to be very complex and progress is difficult. Will the two-yearly meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the EU and the LAC in Peru in May 2008 take place under the sign of a return to a policy with more emphasis on bilateral agreements? The recent agreement with Brazil seems to point in this direction.     

Failure of the WTO Ministerial Conference at Cancun: Reasons and Remedies

This paper first discusses four general developments in the world trading system that have made it increasingly difficult in recent years for nations to reach multilateral agreements aimed at further liberalising international trade, namely: (1) the increased technical complexity and disruptive domestic economic effects of the issues being negotiated; (2) the shift in relative bargaining power among the negotiating participants in favour of the developing countries; (3) the proliferation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements in contrast to multilateral agreements, and (4) the increased emphasis on achieving ‘fairness’ rather than reciprocity in trade liberalisation. Differences in negotiating positions of the participants on the major specific negotiating subjects of the Doha Round, such as new rules covering investment, competition policy, government procurement policy, and trade facilitation, agricultural liberalisation, changes in anti‐dumping and countervailing duty rules, the tariff‐cutting rule to increase access to non‐agricultural markets, and further liberalisation in the services sector, are then considered as well as the likelihood of reaching compromises on these matters. Finally, the possibilities of reaching acceptable balances of concessions and gains are considered for such key participants as the Group of 20 developing countries, the European Union, the United States and other industrial countries.     

Carbon,Trade Policy and Carbon Free Trade Areas

This paper discusses both the potential contribution that trade policy initiatives can make towards the achievement of significant global carbon emissions reduction and the potential impacts of proposals now circulating for carbon reduction motivated geographical trade arrangements, including carbon‐free trade areas. We first suggest that trade policy is likely to be a relatively minor consideration in climate change containment. The dominant influence on carbon emissions globally for the next several decades will be growth more than trade and its composition, and in turn, the size of trade seemingly matters more than its composition given differences in emission intensity between tradables and non‐tradables. We then note that differences in emissions intensity across countries are larger than across products or sectors and so issues of country discrimination in trade policy (and violations of MFN) arise. We next discuss both unilateral and regional carbon motivated trade policy arrangements, including three potential variants of carbon emission reduction based free trade area arrangements. One is regional trade agreements with varying types of trade preferences towards low carbon‐intensive products, low carbon new technologies and inputs to low carbon processes. A second is the use of joint border measures against third parties to counteract anti‐competitive effects from groups of countries taking on deeper emission reduction commitments. A third is third‐country trade barriers along with free trade or other regional trade agreements as penalty mechanisms to pressure other countries to join emission‐reducing environmental agreements. We differentiate among the objectives, forms and possible impacts of each variant. We also speculate as to how the world trading system may evolve in the next few decades as trade policy potentially becomes increasingly dominated by environmental concerns. We suggest that the future evolution of the trading system will likely be with environmentally motivated arrangements acting as an overlay on prevailing trade and financial arrangements in the WTO and IMF, and eventually movement to linked global trade and environmental policy bargaining.     

Regional Integration and Trade: Controlling for Varying Degrees of Heterogeneity in the Gravity Model

The proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in the 1990s prompted a renewal of interest in studying the effect of regional integration on trade. Using a panel dataset of bilateral export flows from 12 EU countries to 20 OECD trading partners over the period 1992–2003, the trade effect of European regional integration, denoted by an EU dummy, is examined across a number of fixed effects (FE) specifications, each of which has been claimed as the correct econometric specification of the gravity model. Typically parsimonious in (time‐varying) economic variables and abundant in fixed effects, the FE specifications allow for varying degrees of heterogeneity in the gravity model. Two gravity models are estimated: a gravity model of traditional trade determinants and a gravity model of new trade theory (NTT) determinants. Both gravity models provide reasonable coefficient estimates, although they vary somewhat across the FE specifications for the traditional gravity model. Both gravity models are congruent in suggesting that the coefficient of the EU dummy declines in magnitude and becomes insignificant as an increasing degree of heterogeneity is admitted into the model. This suggests the fundamental importance of the econometric specification when evaluating trade policy effects within a gravity framework.     

Impact of Environmental Regulations on Trade in the Main EU Countries: Conflict or Synergy?

In an increasingly integrated world with declining trade barriers, environmental regulations can have a decisive role in shaping countries’ comparative advantages. The conventional wisdom about environmental protection is that it comes at an additional cost on firms imposed by the government, which may erode their global competitiveness. However, this paradigm has been challenged by some analysts. In particular, Porter and van der Linde argue that pollution is often associated with a waste of resources and that more stringent environmental policies can stimulate innovations that may overcompensate for the costs of complying with these policies. This is known as the Porter hypothesis. While there is a broad empirical literature on the impact of trade on environment, the empirical literature on the impact of environmental regulations on trade flows is relatively scarce, very heterogeneous and presents mixed results. The innovative feature of this paper is its attempts to estimate, in a gravity setting, augmented with a proxi of environmental stringency, the impact of three major multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) on 15 EU countries’ bilateral exports. According to our estimates, in the period 1988–2008, to be member of MEAs had a positive average impact on EU‐15 bilateral exports. This evidence can be partly explained by a possible trade diversion effect with respect to countries that did not sign MEAs and a corresponding trade creation effect among members of the environmental agreements. Furthermore, evidence coming from interaction effects estimates seems to show that for exporting countries, having signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Montreal agreements partly mitigates (by the amount of the estimated coefficient) the negative impact of having a relatively more stringent environmental regulation on bilateral trade. This result could have important policy implications for the future international trade–environmental negotiations.     

International Trade Agreements and International Migration

Despite large potential economic gains, bilateral and multilateral negotiations focusing on liberalisation of migration have not shared the high profile of international trade negotiations and agreements. Migration and trade have been traditionally viewed rather separately and the relevance of the many, and complex, interdependencies has been given remarkably little attention in the literature to date. In this article, we focus on the two‐way interaction between international migration and agreements designed to enhance cross‐border trade and investment. Liberalisation of international trade in services and in the movement of people potentially offers much greater economic gains than liberalisation of remaining barriers to goods trade. However, progress within multilateral frameworks is fraught with difficulty. The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has yielded little real progress so far and negotiations within more flexible unilateral and bilateral frameworks are likely to be more successful in liberalising the movement of labour. We discuss a range of specific examples, focusing particularly on the interesting case of New Zealand. We find that trade agreements are increasingly including agreements on migration, though typically favouring temporary migration and involving numerically modest quotas. We conclude that migration regulatory frameworks are likely to be further and more strongly linked to trade and investment agreements in the future, particularly given changing economic and demographic forces. The primary focus of migration policies may nonetheless remain different from that of trade policies. While further migration liberalisation is likely to be through bilateral and regional agreements, it will be important to try to lock in the gains of such agreements, while simultaneously working to consolidating these in a way that will help to facilitate future multilateral agreement.     

Computational Analysis of the Menu of US‐Japan Trade Policies

We have used the Michigan Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model of World Production and Trade to calculate the aggregate welfare and sectoral employment effects of the menu of US‐Japan trade policies. The menu of policies encompasses the various preferential US and Japan bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) negotiated and in process, unilateral removal of existing trade barriers and global (multilateral) free trade. The welfare impacts of the FTAs on the United States and Japan are shown to be rather small in absolute and relative terms. The sectoral employment effects are also generally small but vary across the individual sectors depending on the patterns of the bilateral liberalisation. The welfare effects on the FTA partner countries are mostly positive though generally small, but there are some indications of potentially disruptive employment shifts in some partner countries. There are indications of trade diversion and detrimental welfare effects on non‐member countries for some of the FTAs analysed. In comparison to the welfare gains from the US and Japan bilateral FTAs, the gains from both unilateral trade liberalisation by the United States, Japan and the FTA partners, and from global (multilateral) free trade are shown to be rather substantial and more uniformly positive for all countries in the global trading system. The US and Japan FTAs are based on ‘hub’ and ‘spoke’ arrangements. We show that the spokes emanate out in different and often overlapping directions, suggesting that the complex of bilateral FTAs may create distortions of the global trading system.     

Missed Opportunities: The WTO Trade Policy Review for the East African Community

The East African Community (EAC), comprising Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, came into force on 7 July 2000 with a Common External Tariff (CET) established in January 2005. This Trade Policy Review (TPR) of the EAC is timely as all three countries had implemented significant trade liberalisation since the late 1980s while the CET represented an asymmetric change – Kenya and Tanzania essentially reduced tariffs whereas Uganda increased tariffs. The TPR provides considerable information on the CET and on trade and related policies in each of the member countries. However, the EAC and the TPR missed a number of opportunities: the EAC included no coordinated export promotion or investment provisions, while the TPR says little on the potential for intra‐regional trade, and nor does it address the position of the EAC in the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) being negotiated with the EU. This review concentrates on these omissions to explore the implications of the EAC for developments in trade policy in the region.     

Third‐country Effects of Regional Trade Agreements

Does regionalism negatively impact non‐members? To answer this question, we examine the effect of regional trade agreements (RTAs) on imports from non‐members and the tariffs that they face. Using data from six RTAs in Latin America and Europe, we do not find evidence that implementation of the regional agreements is associated with trade diversion from third countries to regional members. Using detailed industry data on preference margins and most‐favoured nation (MFN) tariffs for three trade agreements in Latin America over 12 years, we find that greater preference margins do not significantly reduce imports from third countries. We also look at the effect of preferences on external tariffs. We find evidence that preferential tariff reduction tends to precede the reduction of external MFN tariffs in a given sector, offering evidence of tariff complementarity. Overall, the results suggest that regionalism does not significantly harm non‐members.     

The effects of integration agreements in Western Hemisphere trade, 1970–2014

The paper analyzes the effects of four regional integration agreements (Common Market of the South [MERCOSUR], Andean Community [ANCOM], Central American Common Market [CACM] and North America Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]) on bilateral trade in 19 countries from the Western Hemisphere for the period 1970–2014. For this purpose we estimate different gravity models to control for trade creation and diversion, export diversification and intra-industry trade using OLS log-linearized gravity model and Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood panel data estimators that allow controlling for zero-value trade flows. We find trade creation for ANCOM, MERCOSUR and CACM and trade diversion for NAFTA and MERCOSUR countries. Export diversification negatively affects bilateral trade in all American agreements, while intra-industry trade has contributed to trade expansion in ANCOM and the opposite for NAFTA, MERCOSUR and CACM. Global supply chains may help us explain these results. Finally, we find anticipatory effects on trade several years before the signing of the agreements, but only NAFTA countries seem to be natural trading partners in the region while the rest of Latin American regional agreements have not resulted in a comprehensive, profound and consolidated common market.     

Malaysia – Trade Policy Review 2006

The Trade Policy Review (TPR) is an important document for small open economies like Malaysia. It provides an outsider perspective of its trade policies and implementation. In this paper we provide an update of the Malaysian economy emphasising the degree of competitiveness vis‐à‐vis other Asian counterparts. We also discuss the issue of regional and bilateral trading agreements involving Malaysia with a focus on the services sector. Finally, we briefly consider the issue of tariff protection – an issue raised by many commentators of the TPR.     

Trade Effects of the European Union's Service Directive: Contrasting ex ante Estimates with Empirical Evidence

One of the top priorities to improve the European Union's growth performance is the creation of a single market for services. The directive on services adopted by the Parliament and the Council by the end of 2006 aims at removing barriers to the free movement of service providers on the internal market. Previous studies quantified ex ante sizable effects of implementing the directive in its original form. This paper is a first attempt to evaluate ex post the trade effects induced by a directive – which excludes the country‐of‐origin principle – by performing a difference‐in‐difference‐(in‐differences) estimator on a sample of EU‐ and non‐EU countries in the period 2004 to 10. We account for non‐tariff trade barriers and the endogeneity of regional trade agreements and find that the service directive adds to a reallocation of business services trade within the EU. Accounting for the trade effect of past deregulations, the EU directive fosters a deeper integration of the new member states into the European service value‐added‐chain and promotes business service exports from third countries towards the EU significantly more than trade of country pairs in the control group. The reorientation of the EU‐15 towards the new members is in turn associated with less intense intra‐EU‐10 businesses, while business trade between EU‐15 members is not significantly affected.     

The Gravity of China's African Export Promise

Africa's largest trade partner, China, criticised for exchanging resources for manufactures, has promised to increase imports and optimise the structure of trade with Africa. Using a gravity model of China's imports for the years 1995–2009, we explore potential dynamics for this promise, uniquely accounting for market economy recognition and Taiwan recognition. The former is associated with increased imports, while the latter effect is ambiguous and statistically insignificant. Comparison of projected against actual imports across three growth‐path‐aligned economic geography typologies – resource‐rich; landlocked and resource‐poor; coastal and resource‐poor – sets out China's imports trends in an abstract framework of African export potential. We find not only ‘under’ importing across a majority of resource‐poor countries. We also find that current trade policy is the least applicable to these comparatively poor exporters’ trade with China. If the latter are to serve a broader catalytic role in Africa's regional industrial transformation as compared to the role of coastal and resource‐poor countries in regional economic transformation in Asia and Latin America, China–Africa trade and investment policies may need additional thinking.     

Free Trade Agreements and Governance of the Global Trading System

This article explores how far free trade agreements (FTAs) have strengthened or weakened global governance of the trading system. We open with an analysis of the altered political and economic context within which countries have come, in recent years, to assign a new importance to regional and bilateral trade agreements in their trade policies. We then consider each of the main provisions included in FTAs and comment on how these may separately affect the management of trade relations. We conclude with some observations of the broader trends affecting global governance that are associated with the spread of trade agreements as a whole.     

亚太新双边主义兴起的原因研究——一个政治经济学的分析视角

亚太地区双边贸易协定的兴起与演进形成当代亚太区域经济合作发展的新阶段,其意义和影响日益受到国际社会的普遍关注。本文以政治经济学方法为分析工具,对亚太地区双边主义兴起的动因进行剖析和评价,指出亚太地区双边主义的形成是亚太地区各经济体在当前国际政治经济环境约束下,选择最大化自身利益的贸易政策的必然结果。中国应积极参与建立双边自由贸易区;发挥先发优势,谋求以我为主的区域经济一体化进程;协调国家战略与地区战略,平衡经济利益和政治利益。     

Bilateral Trade and the Eurozone: Evidence from New Member Countries

The question of whether and how much currency unions increase bilateral trade among their members has garnered much attention since Rose’s seminal article. The answer is as pertinent now as ever for both the Eurozone’s existing and future members as the financial crisis shook the very foundations of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and brought its shortcomings into the spotlight. This paper analyses the issue using the gravity equation with country pair and time fixed effects. For a sample of the four new members of the EMU – Slovakia, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus – which has, to the author’s knowledge, not been studied thus far due to their recent joining, and controls drawn from the European Union, this paper finds a positive relationship between joining the EMU and trade with EMU partners but not with non‐EMU partners.