Earthlog · Trade and globalisation
Who has a trade agreement with whom, and how deep it goes. Pick a country to see all of its partners, or pick an agreement to see its members. Switch the map to bank lending to see whether money follows the agreements.
How to read this. Colour shows the legal category the World Trade Organization records for the agreement: a customs union (a shared outside tariff, as in the European Union), a free trade agreement, or a partial scope or services-only deal. Hatched means signed but not yet in force. Where two countries share several agreements the deepest one is shown, and all of them are listed in the table. Depth here is the legal category, not how much trade the deal actually covers or how well it is used.
Money. The bank-lending views use the Bank for International Settlements locational banking statistics: cross-border claims of banks in about 30 reporting countries, in US dollars. Countries that do not report to the BIS appear only as borrowers. Financial centres (for example the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Singapore and Ireland) route money for others, so their figures say little about who ultimately owns or owes it. These figures describe patterns that sit alongside trade agreements; they do not show that an agreement caused them.
Sources. Agreement membership: DESTA, the Design of Trade Agreements database. Please cite Dür, Baccini and Elsig (2014), “The Design of International Trade Agreements: Introducing a New Dataset”, Review of International Organizations 9(3). Category and status: WTO Regional Trade Agreements Information System. Bank lending: BIS. Refreshed monthly.