Climate change, geography and trade agreements: A perspective of Asian bilateral trade

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320363 April 25, 2025 2 / 23 PLOS One Trade agreement, climate change and geography In addition, climate change indirectly affects exports through the weather changes because firms export the weather-oriented goods. Climate change is varied because of the high level of CO2 emissions [9,10]. Besides, CO2 emission is an important element in climate change, and can directly or indirectly affect the environment, including the natural geographic factors such as temperature, mountains, and seashores [11]. Man-made geographic factors also substantially affect export-related activities through firms’ strategies (e.g., increasing return to scale, transportation costs, and trade costs) [12]. However, the influence of these factors is geographically varied. Countries are rich with natural and man-made resources, may gain from trade, whereas countries with poor geographic factors cannot achieve export targets. Nevertheless, the literature shows that traditional theories are derived based on the above geographic concepts instead of giving great attention to empirical ways that are directly or indirectly related to exports. Notably, some man-made factors particularly trade agreements can have substantial influ- ence on bilateral exports, which are signed based on several reasons such as economic size, geographic factors (i.e., distance, common border), bilateral, multilateral political and cultural similarities and so on. Therefore, countries are experiencing exceptional growth of trade

agreements. Recently, more than three hundred preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been implemented globally. The initial trade agreement-related activities were solely regional, and lifted out the sanctions with restriction of article 24 of GATT, however, afterward PTAs, connecting the countries or groups of countries from distinctive regions. These trade agreements could be bilateral or plurilateral (common markets, economic and custom unions). They enlarged the scope of negotiations to areas which out of WTO mandate, and become favorable policy mechanisms. In addition, trade agreement arrangements operate debate for trade-related policy issues. The foundation, span, and reporting of these trade agreement-related arrangements are diverse from each other, and exhibit the extensive het- erogeneity. Interestingly, PTAs are classified into two aspects: shallow and deep integration. So, the shallow integration indicates reduction or elimination of trade barriers, while hidden incorporation refers to coordination of domestic policies and concealed border measures [13,14]. According to World trade organization (WTO), [15] the depth and coverage of PTAs management diverges from regional trade agreement (RTA) to another. Currently RTAs have tendency to go extremely afar tariff-cutting exercise but not utterly those associating with most developed economies. They offer progressively multifaceted policies to govern intra- trade with respect to custom management, protection and standards including preferential

monitoring charter for common trade facilities. Furthermore, a record high-level RTAs go beyond conventional trade policy mechanisms involve the reginal rules on competition, labor and investment. This study concentrates on the fundamental question of whether PTAs contribute to bilateral exports or adversely affect them, as previously assumed by author[16]. The prevailing view suggests that PTAs add value to the development of international trade based on tradi- tional trade agreements while simultaneously operating at the multilateral level [17]. Thus, it is notable that negotiations are required to reinvestigate despite the border measures. The trade agreements are complicated, and their content may change drastically from agreement to agreement [18]. Besides, former literature affianced investigation to present distinction clauses in PTAs such as WTO + and WTOX by introducing [19–22] in an article. The distinction WTO + refers to negotiable areas which fall under the WTO mandate such as customs administration, tariff barriers, export and import restrictions and technical barriers to trade etc., whereas WTOx distinction indicates the independent of WTO mandate, e.g., mobility of the labor, authors can directly collect the data from given sources (websites). Data is publicly available at different websites. It is stated that the data is unable to upload on any link or system after several attempts. So, it is advised that the data can be downloaded from recommended web- sites. The reason is that there are 44436 obser- vations, which are extremely large. Besides,

data is not only country level but also bilateral (country 46* country*46*year21=44436). The panel dataset covers the 46 Asian countries that collect information on variables period from 2000 to 2020 through several internation- al organizations (e.g., the World Bank, CEPII, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The bilateral exports data is collected by UNCTAD website https://unctad.org. The data on tariff, popula- tion and gross domestic product variables is available on the website of World Development Indicators (WDI) https://databank.worldbank. org/source/world-development-indicators. Therefore, the data on variables namely dis- tance, access to Ocean and common border is available on the website of CEPII https://www. cepii.fr/cepii/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele.asp. In addition, the trade agreement (PTA)’s data are collected from WTO website, https://www. wto.org. PTA dummy variable refers to one if exporter and importer listed were in any one of PTA’s listed either the WTO website https:// www.wto.org. Besides, the data on CO2 emis- sions is available from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) website https://www.rug.nl/ ggdc/valuechain/wiod/. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.