Deep Trade Agreements and Global Value Chains
Preferential trade agreements have become deeper over time, often encompassing policy areas that go beyond traditional trade policy, such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the literature, a prominent argume...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/356541529933295649/Deep-trade-agreements-and-global-value-chains http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29945 |
| Summary: | Preferential trade agreements have
become deeper over time, often encompassing policy areas
that go beyond traditional trade policy, such as investment,
competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In
the literature, a prominent argument why countries sign
"deep" agreements is to promote and facilitate the
operation of global value chains. This paper exploits a new
data set on the content of trade agreements and data on
trade in value added and in parts and components, to
quantify the impact of the depth of trade agreements on
bilateral cross-border production linkages. The results show
that adding a policy area to a trade agreement increases the
domestic value added of intermediates (forward global value
chain linkages) and the foreign value added of intermediates
(backward global value chain linkages) by 0.48 and 0.38
percent, respectively. At the sectoral level, the positive
impact of deep trade agreements is higher for higher
value-added industries, suggesting that deep agreements help
countries to integrate in industries with higher levels of
value added. For a larger sample of countries and years, the
results confirm that an additional provision in a trade
agreement increases bilateral trade in parts and components
by 0.3 percent. The content of trade agreements also matters
for global value chain integration, but the impact varies by
income group. Provisions outside the current mandate of the
World Trade Organization (investment and competition policy)
drive the effect of trade agreements on North-South trade in
parts and components. Provisions under the current World
Trade Organization mandate (tariff reduction and customs
facilitation) drive the effect of trade agreements on
South-South trade in parts and components. |
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