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RATIONALES BEHIND THE APPROACH OF THE EUROPEAN UNION TO PREFERENTIAL TRADE AGREEMENTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Abstract
Preferential trade agreements are not a new item in the history of global trade policy, but there has been a marked proliferation of them since the beginning of the 21st century. It is believed that they became a way to overcome the lack of progress in multilateral trade negotiations carried out within the World Trade Organization. However, among various global powers, the European Union was a latecomer to the so called "new wave" of regionalization. The goal of the paper is to point out main reasons and factors affecting the European Union's policy towards preferential agreements. The paper also discusses more general reasons for negotiating PTAs and includes basic statistics on trade agreements signed by the EU. The timeframe of the analysis focuses on the period of 2006-2018. The paper utilizes analytical review of EU's official documents and other publications as well as brief analysis of statistical data on EU's preferential trade agreements. The main conclusion is that the European Union authorities strongly believed that multilateral trade negotiations were a better choice until it became obvious that little progress had been made in the WTO Doha round and there seemed to be no other way. As a consequence, in 2006 the EU adopted a new direction in their trade policy called Global Europe and since then has been negotiating and a number of different agreements with its trading partners.
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