Domestic Determinants of Preferential Trading Agreements.

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to expand previous research on the economic determinants of preferential trade agreements, both by using a updated data set and also by including new potential non-trade and domestic explanatory variables. I find that the differences in primary market sectors of trading partners, the differences in level of infrastructure, the size of countries' agricultural sectors, and differences in countries' degree of democratization are all significant factors in bilateral PTA creation, along with several other variables. While results may not be as strong as in earlier studies, there are several plausible explanations for this, and the inclusion of these domestic factors adds a non-trivial amount of predictive power over the trade-only gravity models used in previous research.