ABSTRACT
PTAs are treaties between two or more countries granting preferential market access and therefore advancing trade liberalization and economic integration among parties to the PTA. While non-reciprocal trade preferences often offered by developed to developing countries have similar effects, PTAs as defi ned in this chapter refer to reciprocal preferential agreements (for a discussion of non-reciprocal preferences, see Chapter 16). In the GATT/WTO, these agreements are offi cially known as Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), but the label PTA has become predominant in scholarly literature and is used here for two reasons. First, Preferential Trade Agreements increasingly involve countries that are not from the same region; consequently, the RTA label can be misleading in this regard. Second, the term PTA highlights an issue of immense importance to the multilateral trading system: PTAs are preferential and therefore by defi nition discriminatory, placing them in tension with the GATT/WTO’s foundational non-discrimination principle.
