Texts of Trade Agreements (ToTA)
Over the last decades, trade agreements have increased not only in number but also in depth. Nowadays, trade agreements seek to regulate a larger number of trade policy instruments than in the past. Conditionalities, exceptions and concessions also add to the complexity of regulatory texts. As a consequence, the average agreement text is now about ten times longer than 25 years ago.
This makes it more and more difficult to analyze and compare the content of trade agreements, which is necessary for estimating their impact on international trade and welfare. Big data and text-as-data methods can help researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders to systematically extract information (and data) from trade regulatory texts.
To give researchers easy access to this type of data, Wolfgang Alschner, Dmitriy Skougarevskiy and I have created Texts of Trade Agreements (ToTA), a publicly available repository of trade agreement texts in xml format, in a joint project of UNCTAD, The Graduate Institute, University of Ottawa and European University at St. Petersburg.
You can download the data in xml format from this repository or play around with it on this interactive website.
Over the last decades, trade agreements have increased not only in number but also in depth. Nowadays, trade agreements seek to regulate a larger number of trade policy instruments than in the past. Conditionalities, exceptions and concessions also add to the complexity of regulatory texts. As a consequence, the average agreement text is now about ten times longer than 25 years ago.
This makes it more and more difficult to analyze and compare the content of trade agreements, which is necessary for estimating their impact on international trade and welfare. Big data and text-as-data methods can help researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders to systematically extract information (and data) from trade regulatory texts.
To give researchers easy access to this type of data, Wolfgang Alschner, Dmitriy Skougarevskiy and I have created Texts of Trade Agreements (ToTA), a publicly available repository of trade agreement texts in xml format, in a joint project of UNCTAD, The Graduate Institute, University of Ottawa and European University at St. Petersburg.
You can download the data in xml format from this repository or play around with it on this interactive website.