Text-as-Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements: Mapping the PTA Landscape

Abstract

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) form an intricate web that connects countries across the globe. In this article, we introduce a PTA text corpus and research tools for its finegrained, automated analysis. Recent computational advances allow for efficient and effective content analysis by treating text as data. We digitize PTA texts and use textual similarity tools to assess PTA design patterns on the global, national, and chapter level. Our descriptive analysis reveals, inter alia, that PTAs are more heterogeneous as a group than, for instance, bilateral investment agreements, but that they converge in regional or inter-regional clusters of similarly worded agreements. Following our descriptive account, we provide three concrete, interdisciplinary examples of how text-as-data analysis can advance the study of trade economics, politics, and law. In trade economics, similarity measures can provide more detailed representations of PTA design differences. These allow researchers to capture more meaningful variation when studying the economic impact of PTAs. In trade politics, scholars can use treaty similarity to trace design diffusion more accurately and test competing explanations for treaty design choices. Finally, in trade law, similarity measures offer new insights into the processes of normative convergence between legal regimes such as trade and investment law.

Sense and similarity: automating legal text comparison

“…Another way automated document comparison can help understand legal processes is by tracking how policies evolve through the changing language in legal texts. Staying with the example of international treaties, NAFTA Chapter 11 marked a clear departure from US bilateral investment treaty (BIT) practice (Alschner et al, 2017b). Prior and subsequent to NAFTA, the US concluded BITs that closely mirrored a common template.…”

Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA)—A Structured Corpus for the Text‐as‐Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements

“…The ToTA corpus emerged from a collaboration between the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and university researchers to make a machine‐readable and structured PTA full‐text corpus publicly available (Alschner et al ). This section describes the source data of the corpus, text preprocessing, structure, and limitations of our corpus and data.…”

“…ToTA allows scholars to conduct similar analyses on a larger scale. From detecting uncanny similarities between two agreements, like the United States‐Peru FTA (2006) and the United States‐Colombia FTA (2006) that share 98 percent of their text, to tracking treaty design diffusion across continents, political scientists can use the text of agreements to investigate PTA design and its determinants (Alschner et al ).…”

Learning About Digital Trade: Privacy and E-Commerce in CETA and TPP

“…Finally, the source of the e-commerce language in TPP is often other U.S. agreements (Alschner, Seiermann and Skougarevskiy, 2017), but Canada had more influence on the CETA chapter (Allee, Elsig and Lugg, 2017, 249 and Table 2), and Canada played the key role on privacy in TPP.…”