Sequencing Regional Trade Integration and Cooperation Agreements

Trade integration agreements and other international cooperation agreements have proliferated in recent years around the world. Rather than being spurred by exogenous forces alone, the two phenomena are likely to be both path‐dependent and endogenous to one another. However, the theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationships between agreements forged in different domains of cooperation remains nascent. The purpose of this paper is to describe a new, extensive dataset on international agreements that can be employed to start mending the gaps in the literature, and to develop ‘best practices’ of sequencing international agreements to obtain higher pay‐offs from cooperation. Of particular interest here is the relationship between trade integration and other cooperation agreements; the data provide preliminary grounds for hypothesising that trade integration agreements can be a particularly likely catalyst for further cooperation between states.