Russia's trade flows and WTO

In our paper, we use the gravity model of the international trade to estimate the effect of the future WTO ascension for Russia based on the current WTO effect for Russia's WTO trade partners. Starting from Rose's specification, we constructed several progressively exact models. Nevertheless, none of these specifications shows any evidence that the WTO significantly and positively influences the trade between its members among Russia's trade partners. This result holds even as we exclude the oil and the gas trade and the FTA influence. Therefore, in terms of increasing the overall trade the value of ascension seems to be lower than FTAs, the impact of which is evident in the model.