Second, countries agree that they will not dump products at a cheap cost. Their companies are doing it to gain unfair market share. They reduce prices below what they would sell at home, or even their production costs. They increase prices once they have destroyed competitors. 17. Antkiewicz A, Whalley J. China`s new regional trade agreements. World Econ. (2005) 28:1539-57. doi: 10.1111/d.1467-9701.2005.00746.x The EU has concluded or negotiated this type of bilateral trade agreements with: the probability distributions of BTA impact indices for all partners with a BTA are represented in Figure 2 in dark colours. Note that the underlying distributions of `out` and `in` are based on 214 entries, because in general `out (C1,C2) is ≠out (C2,C1).

To put these results in perspective, we continue to assess the relevance of the empirically identified effects of TADs by comparing estimated BTA impact indices with the corresponding values for pairs of countries that did not enter into a trade agreement until 2014. For the latter objective, we calculate the BTA index for the 15,199 pairs of countries that did not sign such an agreement during the study period, and we expect an arbitrary reference year in 2002. As shown in Figure 2, the presence of a BTA generally coincides with an increased probability of a positive BTA index. Note that this simple analysis does not directly establish a causal link with the implementation of the BTA, which results in greater confusion of economic ties, as it would also be consistent with the statement that countries with generally more positive economic development have a greater tendency to negotiate trade agreements. Further studies on this aspect would be needed to further study this issue. Overall, estimated probability distributions show that positive BTA indices are more common than negative values. These results are consistent with the overall increase in the volume of international trade in the wake of globalization [19], which also affects couples of countries that do not have a specific trade agreement. The profile of the U.S. BTA is very different from that of China.

BTA`s impact indices on U.S. export ties with their partners highlight a possible focus on boosting their own exports during the negotiations. Although the importance of import links between contracting parties has also increased for the United States, a positive trend has been observed only for Australia, Central America and Jordan. However, this increase in the volume of trade is less important for U.S. partners than their market expansion vis-à-vis third countries. The fact that most U.S. partners reached significantly lower levels after the implementation of their respective BTAs shows that while the volume of bilateral trade is increasing, partner economies have become less dependent on the United States as trading partners. One possible reason for this observation would simply be to make other domestic markets more attractive to the trading partners concerned, who serve as alternative partners, for example. B, due to the general decline in labour costs in these third countries. Since policy decisions are generally based on individual considerations, national policies can only create a general economic environment, but will hardly be able to fully meet the challenge of international economic competition.