The determinants of the inclusion of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements

The increasing number of environmental provisions being signed in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has led to research trying to establish the reasons why countries include these environmental provisions in their PTAs. However, this research has not taken into account the potential interdependence between countries when they adopt environmental provisions in their PTAs.
In this paper, we establish what are the determinants of the adoption by countries of environmental provisions in PTAs and whether countries are influenced by other countries when they adopt these provisions. The influence by other countries can operate through different channels: it can be through distance, trade or policy differences. Our empirical approach takes into account both the time dependency and the interdependence between countries in the adoption of environmental provisions in PTAs.
Our main finding is that spatial interdependence is present in our data. But the channels through which this interdependence operates depends on the characteristics of the environmental provisions.