Does it matter who you sign with? Comparing the impacts of north-south and south-south trade agreements on bilateral trade

Free trade agreements lead to a rise in bilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories are developed or developing countries. Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. In this paper, the results are robust acr...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Behar, Alberto
Other Authors: Crivillé, Laia Cirera i
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C The World Bank 2011
Online Access:
Collection: World Bank E-Library Archive - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 01926nmm a2200229 u 4500
001 EB002100039
003 EBX01000000000000001240129
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 221013 ||| eng
100 1 |a Behar, Alberto 
245 0 0 |a Does it matter who you sign with?  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b Comparing the impacts of north-south and south-south trade agreements on bilateral trade  |c Alberto Behar 
260 |a Washington, D.C  |b The World Bank  |c 2011 
300 |a 23 p 
700 1 |a Behar, Alberto 
700 1 |a Crivillé, Laia Cirera i 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b WOBA  |a World Bank E-Library Archive 
028 5 0 |a 10.1596/1813-9450-5626 
856 4 0 |u http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5626  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
082 0 |a 330 
520 |a Free trade agreements lead to a rise in bilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories are developed or developing countries. Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. In this paper, the results are robust across a number of gravity model specifications in which the analysis controls for the endogeneity of free trade agreements (with bilateral fixed effects) and also takes account of multilateral resistance in both estimation (with country-time fixed effects) and comparative statics (analytically). The analytical model shows that multilateral resistance dampens the impact of free trade agreements on trade by less in South-South agreements than in North-South agreements, which accentuates the difference implied by the gravity model coefficients, and that this difference gets larger as the number of signatories rises. For example, allowing for lags and multilateral resistance, a four-country North-South agreement raises bilateral trade by 53 percent while the analogous South-South impact is 107 percent