About the Authors
Winfried Reimann graduated in 2021 from the MLB Program at Bucerius Law School. Prior to that, he studied physics and worked for several years in a management consultancy firm. During the Master’s Program, Mr. Reimann took the course “International Trade and Investment” with Professor Dr. Natalia Ribberink, who subsequently supervised his master's thesis. Since graduating, Mr. Reimann, has been working in the Federal Ministry of Finance in Berlin, where he is involved with the state-supported stabilization of companies that have experienced difficulties as a result of the corona crisis or the current energy crisis.
Since 2012 Professor Ribberink has been teaching Foreign Trade and International Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg and since 2014, she has been part of the MLB faculty, teaching the course "International Trade and Investment". Her supervision of Mr. Reimann's master's thesis and the results achieved led them to work on a joint paper.
What is the topic about?
The central topic of the course was, amongst other things, international free trade agreements of various designs. For example, while some agreements only lower tariffs, others go further and cover areas such as the harmonization of regulatory standards, the protection of investments or the strengthening of workers' rights.
The idea to then carry out an analysis on the topic "Heterogeneity in Preferential Trade Agreements: Legal Provisions and their Impact on International Trade" arose during the group work and discussions in the course. Various trade blocs were discussed and analyzed using international trade data. As a result, Mr. Reimann suggested further investigating the topic as part of his master's thesis. There he questioned how the various elements of an agreement mentioned above affect trade activities between member states and ultimately strengthen trade.
During the analysis, Reimann and Ribberink came to exciting and sometimes surprising results and then explored these more deeply in the context of a joint paper. The authors succeeded in classifying the variety of valid free trade agreements (261 in total) into three clusters and analyzing the respective effects of a cluster-typical agreement on the configuration of trade flows inside and outside the participating member states.
It became clear, that not every trade agreement automatically leads to more trade. A certain "depth" (in this case meaning: a sufficient number of areas in which trade is liberalized and standards are aligned) must be present. Simply lowering tariffs, for example, is often not effective. Looking at the increasingly important trade in services, even greater depth is required to have a discernible effect on trade growth.
