Updating the World Bank Deep Trade Agreement Database

TULIP contributed to the updating of the World Bank’s Deep Trade Agreement (DTA) Database, one of the most comprehensive and widely used data resources in the field of international trade policy research. The project involved coding an additional fifty Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in accordance with the World Bank’s established methodology, extending the database’s coverage and ensuring that it reflects the rapidly growing body of trade agreements concluded in recent years.

The World Bank’s DTA Database is a landmark resource in trade policy research, providing systematic data on the provisions of trade agreements across seventeen vertical chapters covering a broad range of policy areas beyond traditional market access. These include investment, services, intellectual property, competition policy, government procurement, environmental provisions, labour standards, digital trade, and trade facilitation, among others. By providing a structured, comparable dataset spanning hundreds of agreements over several decades, the database enables researchers and policymakers to analyse trends in the design of trade agreements, assess the depth of integration achieved across different policy areas, and identify factors associated with more ambitious or effective trade governance.

TULIP’s contribution to the database involved careful legal reading and analytical coding of fifty additional FTAs, applying the World Bank’s detailed coding methodology to ensure consistency and comparability with the existing dataset. This required not only a thorough reading of the legal texts of each agreement but also the exercise of informed analytical judgment in applying the coding framework to provisions that may not fit neatly into established categories — particularly in areas such as digital trade, sustainability, and new forms of trade and investment governance that have evolved significantly in recent agreements.

The agreements coded by TULIP span a range of regions and development contexts, reflecting the global spread of FTA activity in recent years. The coding covered both traditional bilateral and plurilateral agreements and newer forms of trade partnership, including agreements with significant sustainability chapters, investment court provisions, and digital trade commitments that represent the frontier of trade agreement design.

The DTA Database is accompanied by a practical toolkit — Deep Trade Agreements: A Toolkit for Policy Makers and Practitioners — which guides users through the database’s structure and methodology, and provides modules on quantifying the benefits of deepening trade agreements, benchmarking agreement content across policy areas, and implementing deep trade agreements effectively. Tulip contributed to Module 2 of the toolkit, which focuses on the benchmarking of the content of deep trade agreements across key policy areas including Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures, and investment provisions.

The toolkit is available here.