This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, focusing on the provisions they contain, beyond phasing out tariffs. Clustering 278 preferential trade agreements based on 906 provisions grouped into 18 policy areas, three clusters are obtained for which a trade...

Modern trade agreements contain a large number of provisions in addition to tariff reductions, in areas as diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related investment measures, or public procurement. Existing research has struggled with overfitting and severe multicollinearity...

Trade liberalization can spur environmental degradation. Concerns over these adverse impacts have led to a debate over the need for environmental provisions in regional trade agreements (RTAs), however the effectiveness of such provisions is unknown. This paper provides new causal evidence that...

In the first two months of 2021, the production of COVID-19 vaccines has suffered setbacks delaying the implementation of national inoculation strategies. These delays have revealed the concentration of vaccine manufacture in a small club of producer nations, which in turn has implications for...

This paper studies the trade effects of Covid-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28 countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by...

This paper presents new high-frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The data set reveals a rapid...

This paper presents new data on the content of preferential trade agreements. The data contain detailed information on the 18 policy areas most frequently covered in preferential trade agreements, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency,...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...

Should the China-U.S. trade agreement prompt relief because it averts a damaging trade war or concern because selective preferential access for the United States to China's markets breaks multilateral rules against discrimination? The answer depends on how China implements the agreement....

Do regional trade agreements negatively impact non-members? This paper revisits this long-standing trade policy question using firm-level data and detailed information on the content of trade agreements. Differently from the conventional view on trade diversion, the analysis identifies a...