IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tbs/wpaper/2026-02.html

Tariff Cuts, Policy Uncertainty, and the Force of Many: The Impact of Plurilateral Agreements

Author

Listed:
  • Lasha Chochua

    (International School of Economics at TSU)

  • Irene Iodice

    (Bielefeld University)

Abstract

Do countries gain more by liberalizing trade together than alone? We study the WTO’s 2016 Phase II expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA), which eliminated tariffs on products covering roughly 12% of world goods trade. Using triple-difference structural gravity, importer–product market access rose by 4–6%. Decomposition reveals nearly half reflects generalequilibrium coordination spillovers—exceeding contributions from direct tariff cuts or reduced policy uncertainty. Exploiting variation in coalition size, spillovers turn positive once participants span about two-thirds of world imports—well below the 80% critical-mass benchmark commonly assumed for plurilaterals. Conditional general equilibrium counterfactuals show ITA Phase II reduced members’ import price indexes by 1.4 percentage points on average, peaking near 2.0 percentage points by 2019. Joint liberalization yields benefits beyond the sum of individual actions— evidence of the force of many.

Suggested Citation

  • Lasha Chochua & Irene Iodice, 2026. "Tariff Cuts, Policy Uncertainty, and the Force of Many: The Impact of Plurilateral Agreements," Working Papers 02-26, International School of Economics at TSU, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
    • Handle: RePEc:tbs:wpaper:2026-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://iset.ge/files/wp_02-26_Plurilaterals_Empirical.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tbs:wpaper:2026-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask the person in charge to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/istsuge.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.