Regional Trade Agreements and the Multilateral Trading System

The book explores bilateral and regional trade agreements and examines how they are changing international trade rules. It offers an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs. The work is based on what is probably the largest dataset used to date. It provides a deep analysis of RTA provisions, identifying which provisions tend to be more liberalizing than others, whether there are any trends that can be identified and whether RTA provisions are moving ahead of the WTO framework, thereby creating a dual system of standards for international trade. Co-published with Cambridge University Press.