Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA)A Structured Corpus for the Text-as-Data Analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements

With multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in deadlock, rulemaking on international economic governance has shifted to preferential trade agreements (PTAs). To facilitate the scholarly investigation of the fast-growing universe of PTAs, this article introduces a machine-readable and structured full text corpus of 448 WTO-notified trade agreements stored on a Github repositorythe Text of Trade Agreements (ToTA) corpus. The article (1) provides a summary analysis of the ToTA corpus, (2) illustrates how text-as-data techniques can be used to investigate PTA design using ToTA, including through an interactive website accompanying this research, and (3) concludes with an overview of research applications involving this PTA text corpus in economics, political science, and law. The current codebook is attached herein as an appendix. The dataset, codebook, and code, as updated, are available at . https://github.com/mappingtreaties/tota.