Saturday 5 May 2018

The natural geography of regional trade agreements and why it is changing over time

a column by Lionel Fontagné and Gianluca Santoni for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Country-pairs self-select in regional trade agreements, and this endogeneity biases the estimation of the impact of such agreements within a gravity framework. This column uses a framework for predicting which countries should engage in RTAs based solely on economic determinants, including global value chains, and compares this ‘natural’ geography of agreements with the actual geography. The results suggest that the endogenous geography of RTAs is shaped by the development of GVCs.

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