Date
2017
Dewey
Economie internationale
Sujet
F13; F14; F15; F53; Deep Integration; Gravity Model; Regional Trade Agreements; Trade Liberalization; International Trade
JEL code
F.F5.F53; F.F1.F15; F.F1.F14; F.F1.F13
Journal issue
Journal of Economic Integration
Volume
32
Number
3
Publication date
2017
Article pages
615-659
Author
Ahcar, Jaime
Siroën, Jean-Marc
Type
Article accepté pour publication ou publié
Abstract (EN)
Regional Trade Agreements have emerged in an environment of stalled multilateral trade negotiations. Although the impact of Regional Trade Agreements on international trade has been well documented, scant attention has been paid to empirical studies exploring their heterogeneity from the point of view of deep integration. We set out to determine whether deeper Regional Trade Agreements promote trade more effectively than less ambitious ones. We generate credible deep integration indicators using two recently available datasets from the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Institute. We then test the effect of depth on trade using a gravity model. We treat additive indicators as factor variables and use multiple correspondence analysis to obtain distilled indicators of deep integration to offer new insights and confirm recent deep integration findings. We find that deeper Regional Trade Agreements increase trade more than shallow agreements do, irrespective of whether the provisions they contain are within or beyond the competence of the World Trade Organization.