EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Trade Re(Im)Balanced: The Role of Regional Trade Agreements

Maria Sokolova

No 06-2016, IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies

Abstract: This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper RTA is associated with a reduction of up to 50% among the sample of over 160 countries since 1960. This implies, that the recent surge in net trade balances has appeared on behalf of the trade between countries that are not involved in RTA integration. The driving channel is the enhancement of cross-border activity and increase in the global value chain integration among RTA members. Overall, this paper implies that the levels of RTA integration should be accounted for in the assessment of aggregate trade balances as the share of GDP, as trade flows bounded by different level of RTA integration will have different reactions to the same shocks. Additionally, I show that RTAs made trade more balanced among its members, and that global increase in the global trade imbalances happened on the expense of the non-RTA trading partners.

Keywords: trade balance; regional trade agreements; competitive depreciation; economic integration; terms-of-trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F13 F14 F15 F40 F41 F45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2016-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.graduateinstitute.ch/pdfs/Working_papers/HEIDWP06-2016.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:gii:giihei:heidwp06-2016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dorina Dobre (departments-web@graduateinstitute.ch).

 
Page updated 2024-12-31
Handle: RePEc:gii:giihei:heidwp06-2016