Measuring World Trade Organization (WTO) Accession Commitments and their Economic Effects

Vicky Chemutai , Hubert Escaith (1)

1 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille

This paper builds an index to measure the depth of accession commitments and estimate the impact of World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. We find that WTO accession has a positive and significant influence on an economy’s trade and investment. The impact of WTO accession on the ratio of trade to gross domestic product is significantly higher than in previous studies on developing countries. Trade in services also tends to increase after accession. Moreover, greater openness does not negatively affect the trade balance of Article XII members. The results on investment, be it domestic or foreign, are also encouraging, but are not fully conclusive.

Keywords: synthetic index; difference-in-difference; exploratory data analysis; WTO Accession; Article XII

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance; Humanities and Social Sciences

Vicky Chemutai, Hubert Escaith. Measuring World Trade Organization (WTO) Accession Commitments and their Economic Effects. Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy, 2017, 08 (02), pp.1-27. ⟨10.1142/S1793993317500077⟩. ⟨hal-01658461⟩