Week 5: The Law, Economics and Politics of Preferential Trade Agreements

This course explores the recent proliferation of preferential trade agreements from a legal, economic and global political economy perspective, investigating the forces shaping the increasing recourse to PTAs in trade governance and the systemic implications deriving from such fragmentation for the WTO system. The course also introduces participants to TradeSift, the Systematic Integrated Framework for Trade Analysis developed at the University of Sussex (UK), an innovative piece of software designed to enable the economic analysis of regional trade agreements without the need for sophisticated economic modelling or specialist training in economics.