Abstract

AbstractMost recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include environmental provisions. While a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few PTAs, others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency. While the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate why certain provisions diffuse more often than others. We hypothesise that the initial conditions under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion. Our results support this hypothesis and indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often than others. At the same time, provisions first designed by economically powerful or environmentally credible countries are not related to more frequent occurrences of diffusion. These findings are of interest for the literatures on international institutions' design, interaction and diffusion.

Highlights

  • Recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include ever more far‐reaching provisions on environmental protection (Lechner, 2016; Milewicz, Hollway, Peacock, & Snidal, 2016; Morin, Dür, & Lechner, 2018)

  • This paper speaks to the treaty design literature by seeking to explain the frequency of certain treaty provisions, to the institutional interaction literature by building on the assumption that some earlier treaties influence the content of later ones, and to the policy diffusion literature by studying the conditions that can kick‐start a diffusion process

  • The results suggest that environmental provisions introduced by PTAs signed between 1981 and 1990, between 1991 and 1995 and since 1995 all diffuse significantly less often compared with provisions introduced before 1980

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Summary

Introduction

Recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include ever more far‐reaching provisions on environmental protection (Lechner, 2016; Milewicz, Hollway, Peacock, & Snidal, 2016; Morin, Dür, & Lechner, 2018). Such PTA provisions do not just appear in the form of exceptions to trade commitments for environmental purposes, modelled on article XX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Rather, they include specific prescriptions, requiring states to adopt high environmental standards. Modern PTAs include various instruments to support the implementation of these environmental provisions, ranging from intergovernmental committees to binding dispute settlement mechanisms

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