This report aims to test whether the inclusion of environmental provisions in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) has contributed to the improvement of environmental quality among the Parties to these agreements through empirical modelling and analysis. Three indicators are considered as a proxy...

Many regional trade agreements (RTAs) contain chapters and articles that are environmentally specific. However, Parties can elect to more broadly incorporate environmental objectives in their RTAs to address their environmental concerns in such agreements. This report investigates in what ways...

This paper looks at market access and national treatment commitments for services in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and in 95 regional trade agreements (RTAs) involving the countries that are covered in the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI). The objective is to...

What influences the adoption of transparency obligations in trade agreements, and what are its effects? This paper uses a new dataset on transparency provisions in over a hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) to provide empirical evidence of the political economy determinants of international...

Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) provisions and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) generally raise trade costs, but by providing a positive signal to consumers that enhances confidence in imported products they can also expand trade. This paper seeks to identify which specific elements of SPS and...

Increasing moves away from multilateralism have created a fragmented trade and investment scenario where economies progressively combine the application of restrictive unilateral actions with bilateral and regional preferences. The application of, and exceptions to, the non-discrimination...