5. Free Trade Agreements as BRI’s Stepping-Stone to Multilateralism: Is the Sino–Swiss FTA the Gold Standard?

In Chap. 5, Casas and Serrano propose that China’s Free Trade Agreements (FTA) are part of a long-term multilateral approach with the potential to be included in the institutional infrastructure of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). By developing a BRI Initiatives Dynamic Evaluation Framework, they emphasize that initiatives under the BRI will be subject to decision and evaluation mechanisms that transcend China proper. This means that FTAs are dynamic rather than static. The key element in this iteration is the FTA upgrade, which includes trade impact analyses, business agent surveys, utilization rates, and signaling effects. The Sino–Swiss FTA is evaluated as part of this long-term strategy of upgrading bilateral relationships into a comprehensive system that relies on institutional outsourcing of the upward kind from nations with deep institution-building experience.