Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have proliferated over the past decade around the world to cover nearly half of global trade. The number of RTAs notified to the WTO is approaching 200, while the total number of RTAs around the world exceeds 300. The global RTA spree has forged a veritable...

Krishna (1998) shows that a bilateral agreement between two countries render a multilateral agreement less attractive if the bilateral agreement is trade diverting. This paper combines Krishna’s model with the empirical approach of Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) to show that the estimated...