Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Has The World Trade Organization Promoted Successful Regional Trade Agreements?, Jason Grant, Christopher Parmeter

Christopher F. Parmeter

The WTO’s Committee on Regional Trade Agreements (CRTA) is charged with monitoring, examining, and ensuring the compliance of RTAs. In this paper we ask whether oversight and examination has fostered successful RTAs using bilateral trade flows as our metric. We develop a comprehensive dataset covering 290 regional economic integration agreements that have entered into force since 1960. Remarkably, the data reveal that almost half (43%) of all agreements in existence (up to 2005) are neither notified nor accounted for in the RTA database published by the WTO. We then exploit variation in the notification status of an RTA to determine …