Economic Globalization Under Threat: Design, Impact and Perceptions of Latin American Trade Agreements (WTI, Seed Money Grants, 2019-2020))

- 1 January 2019

Trade topics: Regional Integration, Trade Policy

Trade agreements have received heightened attention in recent years. Both, initiatives to further liberalize markets as well as protectionist calls have been shaping the current development of trade policy. We have also seen a further shift away from multilateral to regional and bilateral trading arrangements with competing objectives pursued by the US, China and the European Union. What has received less attention is how the current revival of geopolitics and protectionism has been shaping the trade architecture in regions such as Latin America. We are in particularly interested to work on the research frontier of explaining the variation in trade agreements design, their impact on economic, political and legal institutions as well as overall support of citizen in relation to trade agreements’ objectives and content. This is more so important in times when economic globalization is undergoing tremendous changes in light of new geopolitical challenges.
 
This project aims to strengthen research cooperation between the World Trade Institute, a leading center of excellence on trade policy in Europe, and partner institutions in Latin America (FLACSO, PUCP and UChile). The long term objective of this partnership is to create an excellence network for research on trade agreements from an interdisciplinary perspective and focusing on Latin America. The project includes workshops to present ongoing research based on the World Trade Institute’s and its partners’ trade and investment databases and to work towards designing a multi-year research project involving the core members from Argentina, Chile and Peru in a first stage, later to be extended to other interested research institutions.

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