The Design of International Trade Agreements: Introducing a New Database

Abstract

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until very recently, this literature has treated all PTAs as equal. However, PTAs differ significantly in terms of design. In this paper, we present a new dataset on the design of trade agreements (DESTA). We illustrate the usefulness of this dataset in re-visiting the literature on the PTA-trade nexus, that is, the questions if and to what extent PTAs impact trade flows.