Does It Matter Who You Sign With? Comparing the Impacts of North-South and South-South Trade Agreements on Bilateral Trade

Behar, Alberto ; Cirera i Criville, Laia

关键词: ABSOLUTE VALUE;    AGGREGATE TRADE;    AGRICULTURE;    BARRIERS TO IMPORTS;    BILATERAL TRADE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5626
RP-ID  :  WPS5626

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Free trade agreements lead to a rise inbilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories aredeveloped or developing countries. Furthermore, thepercentage increase in bilateral trade is higher forSouth-South agreements than for North-South agreements. Inthis paper, the results are robust across a number ofgravity model specifications in which the analysis controlsfor the endogeneity of free trade agreements (with bilateralfixed effects) and also takes account of multilateralresistance in both estimation (with country-time fixedeffects) and comparative statics (analytically). Theanalytical model shows that multilateral resistance dampensthe impact of free trade agreements on trade by less inSouth-South agreements than in North-South agreements, whichaccentuates the difference implied by the gravity modelcoefficients, and that this difference gets larger as thenumber of signatories rises. For example, allowing for lagsand multilateral resistance, a four-country North-Southagreement raises bilateral trade by 53 percent while theanalogous South-South impact is 107 percent.