Modern preferential trade agreements contain a host of provisions that go beyond tariff liberalisation. By adapting techniques from the machine learning literature, this column develops data-driven methods for selecting the most trade-increasing provisions and quantifying their impact on trade. The results suggest that provisions related to technical barriers to trade, anti-dumping, trade facilitation, subsidies, and competition policy are associated with enhancing the trade-increasing effect of preferential trade agreements. Based on these findings, the effects of individual agreements can be estimated.

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8 July 2022

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Vox EU

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https://new.cepr.org/voxeu/columns/using-machine-learning-assess-impact-deep-trade-agreements

This Blog is published under the centre's Trade programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Trade Policy and barriers to international economic integration