Plurilateral integration agreements and noneconomic objectives

This project revisits the centrality of trade agreements as a mechaniThis project revisits the centrality of trade agreements as a mechanism for international cooperation.

Intervention in international trade and investment increasingly is motivated by noneconomic objectives – fighting climate change, national security, safeguarding societal values – complementing economic competitiveness objectives.

Multilateral agreements to reduce associated competitiveness spillovers are constrained by geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry, as are trade agreements that span the major powers. States have begun to pursue cooperation on a smaller group, plurilateral, basis. These differ from trade agreements by focusing on specific policy areas and potentially being open to many countries.

Research has devoted little attention to understanding the operation, impacts, and political economy of plurilateral integration initiatives.

The project aims to fill this gap through conceptual analysis of the incentives to cooperate on a plurilateral basis, building multi-country panel datasets documenting the use and purported goal of trade, investment, and industrial policies, and empirical analysis of the economic incentives for plurilateral cooperation on trade/investment and regulatory policies, assessing tradeoffs between noneconomic and economic objectives and the size and incidence of cross-border spillovers associated with policies favoring domestic industries or discriminating against foreign producers.

In-depth case studies of domain-specific plurilateral initiatives will investigate effectiveness in attaining stated objectives and reducing spillover costs of national policy instruments.

These analyses are complemented by survey-based research to investigate the preferences of key actors and stakeholders for issue-specific plurilateral agreements as opposed to trade agreements. A synthesis monograph will distil the implications of resulting findings for the multilateral trade regime.