Feature of the Month: Global Free Trade Agreements
Trade agreements serve as a fundamental way for countries to bring their comparative advantages into practice. Trade agreements thereby allow different countries to exchange their specialties, such as natural resources, skilled workers, agriculture-friendly weather, and more with countries lacking these advantages. These agreements accelerate free trade and globalization, creating many benefits for countries involved. Business activity greatly increases among countries agreeing to trade agreements, and therefore investments grow, jobs are created, and peace is maintained. The global economy also realizes benefits as more goods become available to businesses and consumers because of productivity growth created by trade agreements.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) provides a global platform for countries to discuss their trade disputes. It has played an important role in developing global trade agreements. Since WTO created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, over 300 trade agreements have been enacted. This agreement is the world’s most important multilateral trade arrangement and serves as a basis for many other regional agreements.
As globalization further expands, trade agreements are needed more than ever as they can increase the connectivity between countries and create efficiencies in trading across the globe. For more information on trade agreements, check out the new globalEDGE blog series on global trade agreements!
Featured Resources
World Trade Organization: Regional Trade Agreements
Regional Trade Agreements is a sub-section of the World Trade Organization official website. It provides an explanation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) negotiation rules, related statistics, and some featured articles on regional trade agreement topics. It also lists examples of regional trade agreements.
Category: Regional Trade Agreements
Global Union Research Network: Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreement
Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreement is a sub-section of the Global Union Research Network, which is sponsored by Trade Union. It provides new and featured articles about trade agreements, commentary by Trade Union on major bilateral and regional trade agreements, and links to trade agreement related websites.
Category: Regional Trade Agreements
Featured Academy
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) module provides information pertaining to: The historical origins of NAFTA; facts of NAFTA and member states; Canada's role in NAFTA; Mexico's role in NAFTA; future developments towards regional integration. This module provides in depth information on the economic effects of NAFTA and the future possibilities that NAFTA holds. A case study on the U.S.-Canadian software lumber dispute is also included.
Category: Institutions and Trade
Regionalization and Trading Blocs
The Regionalization and Trading Blocs module provides one with information on: what globalization means, its impact on business, and the forces that are driving it; the advantages and disadvantages of globalization, as well as who is in favor of globalization and who opposes the movement; what the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) are, how they work, and what their history is; the history and purpose of some of the world's largest and most influential Regional Agreements: NAFTA, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, and the EU; and the basic premises of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that is currently under negotiation in North, South, and Latin America. A case study on Quebec’s language laws is also provided.
Category: Institutions and Trade
globalEDGE Business Review
"How Global Should Your Supply Chains Be?"
by Tomas Hult, David Closs, and David Frayer (Volume 8, Number 2, pp. 1-12, 2014)
With global supply chains forecasted to increase their strategic influence on companies’ performance from 21 to 25 percent in 5 years and the need for today’s supply chains to become 43 percent more global in the next decade to stay competitive, we offer nine guidelines for managing global supply chains to help companies reach this increased strategic focus and globalization of supply chains.
