The Geography of Conflicts and Regional Trade Agreements

Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2012, vol. 4, issue 4, 1-35

Abstract: In addition to standard trade gains, regional trade agreements (RTAs) can promote peaceful relations by increasing the opportunity cost of conflicts. Country pairs with large trade gains from RTAs and a high probability of conflict should be more likely to sign an RTA. Using data from 1950 to 2000, we show that this complementarity between economic and politics determines the geography of RTAs. We disentangle trade gains from political factors by a theory-driven empirical estimation and find that country pairs with higher frequency of past wars are more likely to sign RTAs, the more so the larger the trade gains. (JEL D72, D74, F15, N70)

JEL-codes: D72 D74 F15 N70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mac.4.4.1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (77)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/mac.4.4.1 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/data/2011-0041_data.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Geography of Conflicts and Regional Trade Agreements (2012)
Working Paper: The Geography of Conflicts and Regional Trade Agreements (2012)
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:aea:aejmac:v:4:y:2012:i:4:p:1-35

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics is currently edited by Simon Gilchrist

More articles in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().