Antoni Estevadeordal

International trade and the rapidly proliferating network of trade agreements have aroused passions for decades. While some blame trade agreements for exporting jobs, sowing poverty, furthering illegal migration, and robbing national sovereignty, others praise them as lynchpins of growth, pillars of peace, guarantors of security, and engines of globalization. Still others view them as useful instruments for fostering global trade and investment. This book examines whether trade agreements merit the blame levelled against them or the hopes pinned on them. It employs extensive new historical data on trade agreements to examine the features of the ongoing trade agreement wave; analyzes the future implications of trade agreements in the context of the multilateral trading system, world trade, and international politics; and puts forth novel policy proposals to make trade agreements a more constructive force in the global economy.

Developing countries have joined the rapidly growing global system of regional trade agreements (RTAs) over the past years. The drive towards regional integration has advanced with the formation of new markets and groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania with few developing countries remaining outside these regional schemes. This volume looks at how 'getting governance right' is a central element for successful RTA implementation, taking stock of the quality and effectiveness of the monitoring of development country RTAs around the world. Organized by the main world regions and primarily focusing on developing country RTAs, the book also includes two case studies focused on monitoring in developed country regional agreements by way of comparison. The contributors operationalize governance in the context of RTA implementation with a more narrow and technical term of 'monitoring' and provide eight important lessons for assessing monitoring around the world.