Identifying Spillovers of Trade Agreements through Impact Assessments: A New Database

Abstract In the past decades, a backlash against globalization has been brewing, especially in advanced economies. Despite this backlash being only partly determined by trade, we observe an increasing demand for transparency on procedures, methodologies, and results. Impact assessments (IAs) aim at identifying expected effects of trade agreements and at highlighting policymakers' concerns, thus representing an important tool to foster public acceptance. To help us identify spillovers of trade liberalization, we construct a country and sector-specific database of impact assessments. This database provides an overview of the evolution of the coverage and methodological approaches taken by the EU and US for their IAs. We rely on official EU and US sources over the period 1990–2023. We first observe differences in terms of methodology and institutional framework within and between the two regions. Secondly, the coverage of non-trade outcomes has evolved over time both for the EU and the US, with the inclusion of more labour, environmental, and human rights indicators as well as cross-cutting issues. We observe that the depth of the evaluation is correlated with the partner country's social protection and environmental performance. Lastly, we find that the inclusion of a sector in the analysis is driven by economic reasons in the EU but by political reasons in the US.