Do Regional Trade Agreements Really Boost Trade? Estimates for Agricultural Products

Sebastien Jean and Jean-Christophe Bureau

Working Papers from CEPII research center

Abstract: The trade effects of tariff preferences are assessed using difference-in-differences panel estimations, whereby exports to third destinations and imports from third origins are used as benchmarks. The method is applied at a detailed product level for 74 agreements, over the period 1998-2009, for the agricultural and food sector. We estimate the mean elasticity of substitution across imports at the product level to be slightly below 4, with significant but limited differences across types of agreements and level of preferential margin. Counterfactual simulations suggest that RTAs have increased bilateral agricultural and food exports between partners by 30% to 40% on average, with a marked heterogeneity across agreements. RTAs are also found to increase the probability to export a given a product to a partner country, but this impact is estimated to be lesser than one percentage point on average.

Keywords: regional trade agreement; international trade; agricultural products; tariff protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/wp/2015/wp2015-09.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cii:cepidt:2015-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CEPII research center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().