Environmental provisions in trade agreements: defending regulatory space or pursuing offensive interests?

The increasing uptake of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is well documented, but little is known about why countries prefer certain types of provisions over others. Exploiting a fine-grained dataset on environmental provisions in PTAs, we hypothesize that environmental provisions are more likely to be adopted when they aim at preserving countries’ regulatory sovereignty. We find that the likelihood of adoption is...