Do Euro-Med agreements improve democracy and the quality of institutions in EU partner countries ?

The European Union enforced respect of human rights and democratic principles an essential elements of all its preferential and non preferential trading agreements since the beginning of the 90's. In all EU external agreements, an essential element would imply that the EU can impose sanctions against violating states, that is, "suspension of high-level bilateral contacts, trade embargoes, suspension of arms sales, suspension of military cooperation and suspension of cooperation", as was the case for Serbia and Burma because of human rights abuses such as torture, political arrests or censorship. But its preference is to use positive action rather than penalties. This paper deals with Euro-Med Agreements, it aims at assessing the impact of these constraints on EU partners governance. Using within comparisons and difference-in-differences estimates, we find that these agreements improved Mediterranean countries governance but not the respect of democratic principles.