How effective are preferential trade agreements? Ask the experts

Limited data on regional and preferential trade agreements prevent social scientists from testing some of the international cooperation literature’s most important claims. Expert surveys—a technique that is widely used in the field of comparative politics but thus far underutilized in international relations—allow us to capture many aspects of trade agreements for which data would otherwise be unavailable. They also provide us with a means of comparing agreements across regions and issue areas. We present a new dataset of expert opinion on the world’s regional trade organizations. Our survey covers 24 dimensions of 40 different regional agreements—including the perceived effectiveness of trade liberalization, the degree to which dispute settlement mechanisms are easy to use, and the political and international influence of the agreement. Bayesian factor analysis allows us to extract a principal dimension of effectiveness. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012