Trade Agreement Text

12 Oct Trade Agreement Text

Conditionalities, exceptions and concessions also increase the complexity of regulatory texts. As a result, the average text of the treaty is now about ten times longer than it was twenty-five years ago. The original Agreement on Trade in Goods, which was just incorporated into GATT in 1994 (see above) Explanatory notes Modern calculation methods, however, require the existence of machine-readable texts. While several databases provide PTA texts, they are usually optimized for reading, but not for computer analysis. As part of a year-long effort, this project used the WTO`s RTA database to find texts and metadata from nearly 450 preferential trade agreements and transform them into a machine-readable format for article, chapter or treaty-level analysis of ATP texts. A comparison of chapters and sections of trade agreements dealing with the same subject matter. In recent decades, trade agreements have increased not only in number, but also in depth. Trade agreements are now trying to regulate more trade policy instruments than in the past. What are the commonalities and differences between investment chapters in international trade agreements and bilateral investment agreements? Textual methods include a large number of finding aid that allow us to gain new knowledge about trade agreements. For example, textual similarity measures are able to identify fine-grained differences in contract design.

So-called dimensionality reduction techniques, which compress textual information contained in a text into a number of abstract variables, can help predict the impact of trade agreements more accurately than the measures available so far. Trade agreements converge into regional or interregional clusters of similar agreements, making it increasingly difficult to analyse and compare the content of trade agreements, which is necessary to assess their impact on international trade and welfare. Big data and text-based methods can help researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders systematically extract information (and data) from trade regulatory texts….