FTA Database Coding for the UK Department for Business and Trade

TULIP supported the UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT) by systematically coding the UK’s existing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in accordance with a structured methodology developed by the World Bank, as part of an effort to build a comprehensive and analytically useful database of the UK’s trade agreement commitments.

The coding exercise was designed to facilitate UK FTA negotiations by providing negotiators and policymakers with a clear and comparable overview of the commitments the UK has already made across its portfolio of trade agreements, enabling them to identify areas of consistency and divergence, assess the depth of integration achieved in specific policy areas, and develop evidence-based negotiating positions for new or ongoing negotiations. In a context where the UK is pursuing an active trade policy agenda following its departure from the EU, having a systematic and reliable overview of existing commitments is a critical resource for the trade policy community.

The World Bank’s deep trade agreement database methodology provides a structured framework for mapping trade agreement provisions across a comprehensive range of policy areas, enabling systematic comparison across agreements and over time. The coding covers both traditional market access provisions — including goods tariffs, rules of origin, and services commitments — and a wide range of behind-the-border regulatory provisions that have become increasingly important in modern trade agreements, including investment, intellectual property, competition policy, government procurement, e-commerce, and trade and sustainable development.

TULIP’s work focused on ensuring that the UK’s existing FTAs — which include agreements with a large number of countries around the world across multiple generations of agreement design — were accurately and consistently coded in accordance with the World Bank methodology. This required both a detailed reading of the legal texts of each agreement and a careful application of the coding framework, including the exercise of analytical judgment in cases where provisions did not fit neatly into the existing coding categories.

The resulting database provides a valuable resource for UK trade policymakers, enabling analysis of the UK’s trade agreement portfolio at both the individual agreement and comparative levels. It supports the UK’s active FTA negotiating agenda by providing a clear baseline of existing commitments and a framework for assessing the ambition and coverage of new agreements under development.