COMCEC Trade Outlook 2016
10
Figure 8: Evolution of Number of RTAs Notified to the WTO
Source: WTO
Box 1: Preferential Trade Agreements
In the past two decades participation to Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) has accelerated
and become more widespread. While in 1990 there were only about 70 PTAs in force, number
of PTAs that are in force reached to 262 in 2015. (WTO database7)
A trend observed in recent years is that many countries prefer being part of deeper preferential
trade agreements. Moreover, the coverage of PTAs also expanded. According to the World Trade
Report 2014, provisions related to competition policy, investment, standards and intellectual
property rights are now included in more than 40 per cent of preferential trade agreements.
Table-A below could be used to evaluate whether the steady increase in the number of
preferential agreements in recent years affected the trade between member countries. As may
be observed from the table, the EU has the largest intra- PTA shares, with intra-export and intra-
import shares were 63 per cent and 59 per cent respectively. For NAFTA, intra-PTA export was
50 per cent while intra- PTA imports was 35 percent. However in ASEAN, most of the trade ( 76
per cent) was with the countries out of the agreement. On the other hand, when some PTAs in
the OIC region evaluated; intra-PTA export shares in total are small for GCC, ECO, ECOWAS and
WAEMU ranging between 6 to 16 per cent.
7
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58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 990
1992199419961998200020022004200620082010201220142016
Cumulative Number
Number per year