Preferential Trade Agreements as Stumbling Blocks for Multilateral Trade Liberalization: Evidence for the United States

摘要

Nearly all countries are currently part of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The importance of PTAs is difficult to overstate, and thus understanding their effects has become a central concern. During the late 1980s and early 1990s multilateral trade negotiations were stalled while the United States and the European Union successfully pursued PTAs. This triggered the question of whether PTAs promote or slow multilateral trade liberalization (MTL) or, as Jag-dish Bhagwati (1991) puts it, whether PTAs are a "building block" or a "stumbling block" to MTL. After a decade of theoretical work on that question, no consensus has been reached and there is a surprising absence of empirical evidence on it. We use detailed data on U.S. tariffs to provide the first systematic evidence that the direct effect of U.S. PTAs was to generate a stumbling block to its own MTL.