Assessing Preferential Trading Agreements Using the Sussex Framework

Preferential trading arrangements involving developing and developed countries are proliferating. These are both difficult to assess and call on scarce analytical and negotiating resources particularly but not only in developing countries. The Sussex Framework, developed with DFID support, is designed to cut through these difficulties. It is a logical framework which allows the user to set out the elements of any particular proposed agreement in a clear, rigorous and consistent way, derive a set of diagnostic statistics from readily available trade and trade barriers databases and use them to assess a set of policy ‘rules of thumb’ which will allow an over all judgement on the likely balance of economic welfare effects to be drawn. The framework deals with both shallow integration (removing border barriers) and deep integration (facilitating trade by dealing with trade-impeding factors operating behind the frontier); all in a way designed to make parsimonious use of scarce analytical and negotiating resources.