Suchergebnisse

This article examines some international factors contributing to the recent spread of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). PTAs help states to ensure against future disruptions of commerce with key trade partners. When stress is placed on the international trading system, the threat of such disruptions rises. Both hegemonic decline and global recessions raise the specter of commercial closure, and therefore each factor may stimulate the proliferation of PTAs. Furthermore, strategic interaction among both PTAs and countries is likely to guide the growth of preferential arrangements. As PTAs become increasingly pervasive, states that are not covered by one have strong incentives to enter such an arrangement. Doing so reduces the prospect that their access to important markets will be curtailed and that their competitiveness abroad will be undermined. The findings of this article conform with these arguments. In general, eroding hegemony, global recessions, and strategic interdependence have accelerated the pace of commercial regionalism since World War II.

The growing number of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) since World War II has generated substantial interest in their economic and political effects. It has also prompted interest in the factors that give rise to PTAs, but very little research has been conducted on the growth of extant PTAs. To address this shortcoming, we analyze why some arrangements expand, whereas others do not. We find strong evidence that expansion is most likely when the existing members of a PTA display a high degree of trade openness and when the size distribution of these members is fairly uniform. We also find that PTAs that add new members are likely to do so again in the near future and that, throughout the global system, PTAs tend to expand in clusters. Equally, there is some indication that the market size of a PTA affects its odds of expansion. Finally, we investigate which states join enlarging PTAs. We find that PTAs expand by taking on new members that are economically and politically similar to existing members. Adapted from the source document.