Kick‐starting diffusion: Explaining the varying frequency of preferential trade agreements’ environmental provisions by their initial conditions

Abstract

Most recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include environmental provisions. While a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few PTAs, others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency. While the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate why certain provisions diffuse more often than others. We hypothesise that the initial conditions under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion. Our results support this hypothesis and indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often than others. At the same time, provisions first designed by economically powerful or environmentally credible countries are not related to more frequent occurrences of diffusion. These findings are of interest for the literatures on international institutions' design, interaction and diffusion.

Towards Greening Trade? Environmental Provisions in Emerging Markets’ Preferential Trade Agreements

“…The same is true for the extent of environmental content included in PTAs (Morin, Dür, & Lechner, 2018). Our research contributes to the emerging literature on the design of PTAs, their implementation and their non-trade implications (Baccini et al, 2016;Dür et al, 2014;Gray, 2014;Kim, 2012;Kucik, 2012;Morin, Blümer, Brandi, & Berger 2019;.…”

“…Based on a comprehensive and fine-grained dataset, Morin et al (2018) argue that democracies facing import competition and countries which care about environmental protection are more likely to include environmental provisions in their PTAs. Morin et al (2019) investigate the diffusion of environmental provisions and show that provisions that have been integrated in intercontinental agreements are more likely to be picked up in future agreements.…”

Taking it seriously: commitments to the environment in South-South preferential trade agreements

“…Experience and costcalculation should induce countries with already committed environmental clauses in an agreement with the global North to adopt such standards also in their South-South agreements. From this perspective, policy continuation seems more intuitive than dis-continuation since countries must make an intentional decision to change their past treaty commitments; a rationale in line with recent research on diffusion processes in general (Graham et al 2013) and of environmental clauses in PTAs in particular (Morin et al 2019). Therefore, this first explanation would attribute little to no additional value to countries' South-South environmental clauses since any meaningful impetus for (or signal of) higher domestic commitment and performance should have come with the prior North-South commitment.…”

Environmental provisions in trade agreements: defending regulatory space or pursuing offensive interests?

“…As a result of network effects, the introduction of a single new environmental provision in one PTA can quickly diffuse in the trade system and lead to a general increase in the average number of environmental provisions per agreement (Milewicz et al 2016). Scholars have found such diffusion effects to be particularly strong in the case of intercontinental agreements (Morin et al 2019).…”