ABSTRACT

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become increasingly a strategy for promoting exports among countries. While this increasing use of RTAs is indication itself of the belief by exporting countries of their effectiveness, this chapter empirically tests for their impacts on exports in countries around the world. As a final means of investigating the impact of RTAs on exports, trade creation and trade diversion effects are incorporated by allowing for crossover effects from RTAs. The combined General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade /World Trade Organization (WTO) and RTA result can explain why countries have turned to RTAs as their preferred means of expanding exports rather than the WTO multilateral process, which does not show as much evidence of increasing exports in these countries. The few cases are export diversion on the part of Korea's RTAs for France, Thailand for Germany, China for the United Kingdom, and Singapore for Russia.