The trade liberalization effects of regional trade agreements. Working paper

Recent research suggests that membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is not associated with more liberal trade policies. In this paper, we ask if membership in a regional trade agreement (RTA) helps to liberalize trade. Using 63 trade policy measures, we find that RTA membership has, on average, no measurable effect on a country’s trade policy. We also find considerable differences across RTAs, with member countries in the European Union being significantly more open and less protectionist than members in other RTAs. * We thank Andrew Rose for comments and for making the data on trade policy measures available to us. Opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent the views of Bankgesellschaft Berlin