Regional Trade Agreement（RTA）refers to an international treaty concluded by two or more countries or customs territories to eliminate trade barriers among members and regulate trade cooperation relations. The WTO Regional Trade Agreement Database completely includes over 600 regional trade agreements and more than 300 pieces of change information signed worldwide from 1948 to 2025, covering trade in goods, trade in services, and in-depth clause texts. It provides authoritative data support for researchers and policymakers to track the evolution of international trade rules, trends in regional economic integration, and the economic effects of agreements.

Data Features:

• Comprehensive Spatial and Temporal Coverage: It covers all WTO member economies globally, including complete records from the first RTA in the world since the entry into force of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948 to the present. It provides an irreplaceable time-series foundation for studying long-term changes in trade rules.
• Rich Content Dimensions: It includes various key information related to RTAs, ranging from basic elements of agreements such as numbers, names, and dates, to more detailed information such as WTO consideration processes and specific entry/exit dates.
• Dual-table Linkage, Forming a Dynamic Tracking System: It contains complete RTA basic information tables and change information tables, covering the entire life cycle of an agreement from its signing to the present, including initial signing, clause revisions, changes in member states, updates of validity status, etc. It supports comparative analysis of multiple versions of the same agreement and provides a continuous observation basis for studying the long-term evolution of regional economic integration.

Potential Application Scenarios：

• Academic Research: The database provides rich data support for academic research in fields such as international trade, international economy, global value chain division of labor, and geopolitical rule games.
• Business Services: It helps enterprises evaluate the impact of trade agreements on their businesses when making cross-border investments and expanding into international markets, such as tariff preferences, enterprise market entry strategies, and compliance risk management.
• Policy Optimization: It assists government departments in formulating more targeted international trade policies, improving competitiveness in international trade, and better responding to the impact of changes in trade agreements.

   USDataverse WTO Regional Trade Agreement data features spatial and temporal completeness, rich fields, and dynamic tracking, providing an irreplaceable empirical basis for academic research, policy evaluation, and enterprise decision-making, and offering important data support for decoding the process of global regional economic integration.

Time Range

1948 - January 2025, including all regional trade agreement information and regional trade agreement change information.

Field Description

Sample Data

RTA Basic Information Table

RTA Change Information Table

Data Update Frequency

Updated Irregularly