國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

According to the Commission of the European Union (EU), there have been to date (November 2011) twenty-eight Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed between the EU and its trade partners. However, most existing studies of existing EU FTAs are either single-case studies or limited-case comparative studies. As a result, our knowledge is confined to which policy provisions each of the EU FTAs included or omitted, what legal and political controversies were attached to each of the FTAs, and the economic impact each FTA had on its signatories. There have been few attempts to generalize the existing knowledge derived from case studies on these FTAs. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by systematically categorizing and analyzing the content of EU FTAs. Using Horn, Marvroidis, and Sapir’s classification framework, which categorizes fifty-two policies into either WTO plus (fourteen items) or WTO extra (thirty-eight items) policy areas, the paper seeks to identify the policy areas included in each of the twenty-eight EU FTAs, at the same time as developing hypotheses to explain policy coverage rates for EU FTAs. The paper finds that most EU FTAs can be classified as WTO-plus type, in the sense that they include higher proportions of WTO-plus policy items. In addition, the following explanatory variables are found to be correlated with the appearance of a WTO-plus policy focus: the chronological order in which FTAs are signed, the 2006 dummy item, the population and economic size of the trade partner, the number of FTAs previously signed by the trade partner, the number of EU members when the FTA is signed, and whether the trade partner is geographically adjacent to EU member states.