What Is Preferential Trade Agreements

All of the above-mentioned agreements are indeed free trade agreements, but for various reasons members prefer to call them under a different name. In many cases, these designations reflect the broader scope of the agreements: many recent free trade agreements go beyond the scope of traditional trade agreements and cover areas such as government procurement, competition, intellectual property, sustainable development, labour and the environment, etc. With the recent proliferation of bilateral EPAs and the emergence of mega-EPAs (large regional trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)), a global trading system managed exclusively within the framework of the WTO seems unrealistic and interactions between trading systems must be taken into account. The increasing complexity of the international trading system resulting from the proliferation of PTAs should be taken into account when considering the choice of forums used by countries or regions to promote their trade relations and environmental agenda. [2] NTPs have grown rapidly; in the 1990s, there were just over 100 ENTPs. .