Competition policy
is one important aspect of trade liberalization. However, when examining
preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a major type of policy tools to
liberalize trade, competition provisions are revealed not to be uniformly
distributed across these treaties. What explains the variation in the design of
competition clauses in PTAs? Borrowing insights from the rational design of
international institutions and combining them with those from treaty
ratification and policy diffusion literatures, I identify five major causal mechanisms
through which competition provisions are incorporated into PTAs. In evaluating
them, I employ a range of operationalization techniques to capture the proposed
mechanisms. A treaty-level analysis of 319 PTAs over the period 1960–2015 lends
strong and robust support to most of the hypothesized relationships. By
integrating theoretical frameworks across international political economy
literatures with that from law and economics scholarship, this study
demonstrates the utility of political science thinking to the real-world
international law-making.
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