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The Review of International Organizations
Published in: The Review of International Organizations 3/2012

01-09-2012

How effective are preferential trade agreements? Ask the experts

Authors: Julia Gray, Jonathan B. Slapin

Published in: The Review of International Organizations | Issue 3/2012

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Abstract

Limited data on regional and preferential trade agreements prevent social scientists from testing some of the international cooperation literature’s most important claims. Expert surveys—a technique that is widely used in the field of comparative politics but thus far underutilized in international relations—allow us to capture many aspects of trade agreements for which data would otherwise be unavailable. They also provide us with a means of comparing agreements across regions and issue areas. We present a new dataset of expert opinion on the world’s regional trade organizations. Our survey covers 24 dimensions of 40 different regional agreements—including the perceived effectiveness of trade liberalization, the degree to which dispute settlement mechanisms are easy to use, and the political and international influence of the agreement. Bayesian factor analysis allows us to extract a principal dimension of effectiveness.
previous article Global governance behind closed doors: The IMF boardroom, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, and the intersection of material power and norm stabilisation in global politics
next article Kathryn C. Lavelle. 2011. Legislating International Organization: The US Congress, the IMF, and the World Bank (New York, NY: Oxford University Press)

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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
This is the well known problem of selection bias; see Heckman (1976), Vreeland (2003) and von Stein (2005) for applications.
 
2
“SADC countries fail to meet customs union, currency targets,” PANA, 4 September 2009.
 
3
Author interview, Buenos Aires, July 2009.
 
4
“Mercosur Limps Slowly Along,” Mario Osava, Interpress Service, 3 January 2008.
 
5
Many other researchers have embarked on similar efforts with intergovernmental organizations more generally; see Koremenos ongoing Boehmer et al. (2004), Volgy et al. (2008), Bondanella (2009).
 
6
The descriptive statistics for salience are similar; we list all summary statistics in an Online Appendix available at this journal’s webpage.
 
7
The Online Appendix contains the correlation matrix.
 
8
This does assume that missing observations are ignorable. In other words, they are missing at random. Conditional upon the model, all observations are equally likely to be missing. Of course, this may be a strong assumption. An alternative approach would be to model the patterns of missingness and run a multiple imputation model prior to running the factor analysis.
 
9
We should note that the relatively small number of observations make more complicated procedures, such as hierarchical item-response models, infeasible. Moreover, we have found that running models with more dimensions tends to ask too much of the data.
 
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Metadata
Title
How effective are preferential trade agreements? Ask the experts
Authors
Julia Gray
Jonathan B. Slapin
Publication date
01-09-2012
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
The Review of International Organizations / Issue 3/2012
Print ISSN: 1559-7431
Electronic ISSN: 1559-744X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-011-9138-1

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