State-Owned Enterprises

The authors have mapped the provisions on state enterprises in 283 Preferential Trade Agreements (‘PTAs’) signed between 1956 and early November 2016 included in the WTO Regional Trade Agreements Information System (‘RTA-IS’). This mapping is functional to assessing the vertical depth of these provisions, partly using as benchmark the relevant disciplines in the WTO, which is the ultimate purpose of the Deep Integration research agenda of the World Bank, and follows up the Horizontal Depth project. This paper outlines the methodology underlying the creation of a new dataset and includes an initial description of the main patterns that emerge from the dataset. The final section of the paper attempts to offer some tentative conclusions on the vertical depth of the state enterprises provisions in the examined PTAs.