Boilerplate in International Trade Agreements

Abstract

New international agreements often recycle language from previous agreements, using boilerplate solutions alongside customized provisions. The presence of boilerplate in international agreements has important implications for understanding how international rules are made. The determinants behind boilerplate in international agreements have not previously been systematically evaluated. Using original data from a sample of 348 preferential trade agreements (PTAs) adopted between 1989 and 2009, we combine novel text analysis measures with Latent Order Logistic (LOLOG) graph network techniques to assess the determinants behind boilerplate in labor and environmental provisions commonly found in PTAs. Our results indicate that whereas boilerplate can be used for both efficiency and distributive purposes, international boilerplate is used primarily for efficiency gains and power-distribution considerations are not systematically important.

Do Greener Trade Agreements Call for Side-Payments?

“…Driven by the two largest donors, namely, the EU and the United States, we find empirical evidence that the number of environmental provisions in new North-South PTAs is positively associated with bilateral aid commitments during negotiation phases, especially shortly prior to signing the PTA. Since high-income countries typically use PTA templates and grant their developing country partners little say on content (e.g., Allee & Elsig, 2019;Peacock et al, 2019), we conclude that aid serves as a side-payment for recipients to agree upon already formulated PTA content. The greener the template is, the more aid will be committed to seal the deal.…”

“…This is because of the well-researched practice of high-income countries entering negotiations with developing countries with a pre-defined template of PTA provisions (e.g., Allee et al, 2017; Alschner et al, 2018; Baccini et al, 2015). Recent works by Allee and Elsig (2019) and Peacock et al (2019), for example, point to the fact that most PTA provisions are simply copy-pasted by high-income countries from their previous PTAs. In more than 100 PTAs, 80 percent or more of the contents is copied from previous agreements, with many PTAs copying 95 percent or more word-for-word (Allee & Elsig, 2019).…”

“…In more than 100 PTAs, 80 percent or more of the contents is copied from previous agreements, with many PTAs copying 95 percent or more word-for-word (Allee & Elsig, 2019). The standard Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in EU PTAs include almost the same language, and US PTAs also heavily rely on copy-pasting (Peacock et al, 2019). Hollway et al (2020) find that 87 percent of trade agreements include only provisions that were copy-pasted from earlier agreements.…”

Trade and the Environment

“…It is also strongly driven by the two largest donors, the EU and the US. These two entities usually use PTA templates and offer developing countries a limited say on the content of trade agreements (e.g., Allee & Elsig, 2019;Peacock et al, 2019). This indicates that aid is used as a side payment to seal the deal and agree on previously prepared treaty content.…”

Promise Not Fulfilled: Fintech Data Privacy, and the GDPR

“…The standardization of legal text is often deemed uninformative for the reader and is therefore referred to as boilerplate in academic literature. Boilerplate language is characterized by very similar uses of language and wording across legal documents from different issuers (Peacock et al, 2019) and little company-specific information (Brown and Tucker, 2011). For a user, boilerplate text requires much effort to read, and details might appear to be irrelevant (Bakos et al, 2014).…”