The impact of EU trade preferences on the extensive and intensive margins of agricultural and food products

In this paper we study the trade creation effects of the EU preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the agriculture and food sectors for a large sample of developing countries in the period 1990-2006. Main results show that the EU PTAs positively affect agricultural extensive margins, especially through other than tariff impacts linked with the PTA, while in the food industry the results are more sensitive to the estimator used. As far as the intensive margin is concerned, the PTA effect is only driven by the role of tariffs, while other effects of the PTAs do not exert any relevant impact on agricultural and food products.