A New Examination of the Impacts of Regional Trade Agreements on International Trade Patterns

This paper assesses the ex-post effects on the international trading system of eighteen pluri-lateral regional trade agreements (RTAs) by examining their impacts on intra-bloc trade and on the tendency of members to trade with the rest of the world. This study is based on a gravity model with a solid theoretical foundation involving Anderson and van Wincoop’s (2003) multilateral resistance terms. The model assesses 160 countries over a time period that extends from 1960 to 2014. Making use of the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimator and selecting the proper RTA variable and fixed effects settings, our analysis confirms the widespread trade-promoting effects of RTAs with mixed effects on extra-bloc trade. However, trade diversion in terms of bloc exports and imports are detected mostly in American and African trade agreements in many cases. By contrast, export and import creations are more prominent for RTAs in Europe and Asia.