Sorgho, S. and Tharakan, J. (2022).CREATE-2022-02_WP_01

Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, few empirical studies have investigated the environmental effects of PTAs as opposed to the effect of trade openness.2 The first empirical study of the impact of PTAs on the environment (Ghosh and Yamarik, 2006) was followed by only three articles on the effects of PTAs with EPs on pollution levels or environmental outcomes (Baghdadi et al., 2013; Zhou et al.,. [...] The first article introduced the idea of the existence of an effect of PTAs on the environment. [...] Conspicuous jumps occurred in 1975 and 1994, the former due likely to the Generalized System of Preferences, adopted in 1968 under the auspices of the UNCTAD, which provided a formal system of exemption from the more general rules and resulted in the USA and other industrialized countries signing PTAs preferentially with developing nations (Sorgho and Tharakan, 2018). [...] Data description The sources of the dataset constructed for this study and the statistics for the covariates used are summarized in Table 2 and Table 3. [...] Results are reported for the following three specifications: - 1: the effects of all PTAs with environmental provisions (PTAwEP) - 2: the effects of PTAs with climate-related provisions (PTAwCP) - 3: the effects of PTAs with and without climate provisions, simultaneously.