Tuck's New Trade Agreements Database Goes Online

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—November 21, 2003

CONTACT: Kim Keating-603-646-2733

HANOVER, N.H.—In the aftermath of the collapse of world trade talks at Cancun and the minimalist outcome of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Ministerial Meeting held in Miami this week, the world trading system appears to be falling into a widening spiral of fragmentation. With new trade deals emerging at an accelerating pace around the world, governments and trade professionals need tools to understand and analyze the increasingly complex web of preferential trade agreements.

The Center for International Business (CIB) at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has established the CIB Trade Agreements Database and Archive-a searchable database and archive of international trade agreements dating back to the 1950s. This resource-the first of its kind-is intended to help users: 1) navigate through the web of free trade and customs unions agreements and 2) understand how and where preferential trade agreements confer advantages, impose restrictions, and otherwise affect the flow-and the costs-of trading in the international arena.

Tracking those agreements and their effects on trade and business has not been a simple task, until now. With a hemisphere-wide FTAA seeming a more distant goal, do you wonder which Latin American countries have already signed trade deals with one another-and what they've agreed to? Do you need to know what special terms Hong Kong got in its recent agreement with China? Or how the E.U.'s many free trade agreements differ from those negotiated by the U.S.? The Tuck/CIB Trade Agreements Database permits fast and easy access to the answers, and is updated regularly to include all known free trade and custom union agreements. It allows for easy searches by country, provision, commodity, timeframe, and even by a specific word or phrase.

To use the Trade Agreement Database, visit: cib.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cibresearch.

Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide. Information about the Tuck School is available at www.tuck.dartmouth.edu.

The Center for International Business at Tuck is dedicated to education and research into the economic, social, and political factors that affect business in the international arena, particularly in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and other rapidly developing regions of the world. Visit their website at www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cib.