This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) concluded between Asian Pacific States in 2020 is expected to change regional and global trade patterns. Based on a Computable General Equilibrium model (including 41 countries and 39 sectors), the underlying paper evaluates the impact of...

We estimate the effect of RTAs on bilateral exports by means of a gravity model analyzing its sensitivity to different specifications and methods. RTAs generate a sizable positive effect. However, shifting to country-pair and time-varying fixed effects systematically reduces coefficients....

From 1948 to 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Secretariat received 124 indications of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) relating to the trade in goods, and since the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, more than 240 additional RTAs (covering trade in...