摘要：Regional trade agreements (RTA.s) have become a fixture in the global trade arena.Their advocates contend that RTA.s can serve as building blocks for multilateral tradeliberalization. Their opponents argue that these trade pacts will divert trade from moreefficient nonmember producing countries. This analysis of RTA.s finds that U.S. agricul-ture can benefit from participating in RTA.s and may lose when it does not. Agricultureis an important source of potential U.S. gains from RTA.s. Regionalism and multilater-alism are likely to be mutually reinforcing in agriculture. While the United States, as aglobal trader with diverse trade partners, potentially can gain more from global freetrade than from RTA.s, many recent RTA.s have been more comprehensive in their liber-alization of agricultural trade liberalization than the Uruguay Round. A strong multilat-eral process can help ensure that RTA.s are trade creating, rather than protectionist.
