Do Preferential Trade Agreements Facilitate Greater Environmental Protections?

• In Event: International Politics and the Environment

Abstract

Do preferential trade agreements (PTAs) facilitate greater environmental protections on the part of signatories or merely advance global capitalism and its great race to the bottom? The average number of environmental provisions per PTA has dramatically increased since the 1990s as have the consequences of climate change, increasing the urgency of this question. Earlier scholarship on this topic focused on the environmental impact of trade liberalization, arguing that trade liberalization undermines environmental objectives. Other scholarship has claimed contrarily that trade liberalization agreements encourage countries to adopt higher environmental standards, by facilitating policy dispersion from advanced economies with stronger environmental protections to developing countries. Some scholars have articulated a more nuanced logic where the impact of trade liberalization on environmental quality varies depending on the trading partners and the nature of their relationship. Continuing this logic, we attempt a larger-N analysis of the relationship between the content of PTAs signed (recorded and measured in the Deep Trade Agreements Database) and countries’ de facto and de jure levels of environmental protection. Our dyadic analysis includes data on 100+ countries. We find that while deeper PTAs are more likely to induce environmental regulatory improvement, the effect is conditional on dyadic and country-level characteristics such relative economic size, power, and regime type.

Authors

• Heather Ba, University of Missouri

• Omer Faruk Sen, University of Missouri

• Baekkwan Park, University of Missouri