BUSI 464 Week 5 Research Paper: Outline Example

Joining the Club: An Outline for a Research Paper on Regional Trade Agreements and Accession

Working Title, Question and Thesis

Working title: Joining the Club: What Regional Trade Agreements Offer and What Membership Demands

Research question (refined after the bibliography): Across the world's regions, what benefits do trade agreements deliver to members, and what price in reform and sovereignty does a newcomer pay to share in them?

Thesis: Joining a regional trade agreement pays most when the agreement is deep and its entry terms are clear and credible, because those conditions both raise trade and push the reforms that make membership worth having.

Outline

I. Introduction (1 page)

• Regional trade agreements now number in the hundreds, and nearly every country belongs to at least one (Lynch, 2010).
• The paper asks what these agreements do and what joining one requires, and argues the thesis above.
• Roadmap: background, effects, regional survey, two accession routes, lessons.

II. Background: Why Agreements Exist and Spread (2 pages)

• Claim: Countries sign agreements both to gain market access and to avoid being left out when neighbors sign.
• Evidence: the post-Cold War wave of agreements and its political drivers (Mansfield & Milner, 1999); the contagion of agreements as excluded exporters pressure their governments (Baldwin & Jaimovich, 2012).
• Key terms defined early, including the difference between new trade and trade merely rerouted from outsiders, and whether regional deals help or hinder global liberalization (Freund & Ornelas, 2010).

III. What Agreements Do (2 pages)

• Claim: On average agreements raise members' trade substantially, but the average hides wide differences.
• Evidence: roughly a doubling of members' trade within a decade (Baier & Bergstrand, 2007); large variation across 296 agreements, with deeper and enforceable ones doing more (Kohl et al., 2016).
• Evidence on design: agreements have grown deeper over time, adding services, investment and standards (Dür et al., 2014).

IV. A Survey of the Regions (3 pages)

• Claim: Regions integrate in different ways, which changes what membership means.
• Points, one paragraph each, drawn from the regional chapters in Lynch (2010): Africa's overlapping blocs and the continental free trade area; the Americas, from NAFTA and the USMCA to Mercosur; Asia's supply-chain-led integration; Europe's single market; the Eurasian Economic Union; the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab agreements; and the Pacific Islands.

V. Two Routes to Membership (3 pages)

• Claim: Accession ranges from the demanding, conditional process of the European Union to the lighter, rules-based entry of a free trade area.
• European Union: application, candidate status, negotiation chapter by chapter, adoption of EU law, ratification by every member; conditionality works when rewards are credible and costs manageable (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2004).
• Payoff: new members' incomes about 12 percent higher on average a decade after joining (Campos et al., 2019).
• Free trade area: entry into the Trans-Pacific partnership through an accession working group, acceptance of existing commitments and market-access offers; the United Kingdom's accession, concluded in 2023, as the first completed case.

VI. Lessons for a Country Considering Membership (2 pages)

• Claim: Membership is worth most when a country can meet the agreement's standards and its firms can actually use the preferences.
• Example to develop: Mexico's experience under NAFTA, from Essay 1, shows large trade gains alongside uneven social effects, a reminder that membership's benefits depend on domestic policy as well as the treaty.
• Example to develop: Poland's accession, from Essay 2, shows how credible entry terms drove reforms before membership and how emigration followed after it.
• Points: depth matters more than the label; credible entry terms drive reform; firms must be able to use the rules, which argues for simple rules of origin.
• Biblical integration: the treaty between Solomon and Hiram in 1 Kings 5 as an early trade agreement grounded in mutual benefit and kept in good faith.

VII. Conclusion (1 page)

• Restate the thesis and the answer to each part of the research question.
• Note limits: the paper relies on studies of average effects, and accession outside Europe has few completed cases to study.
• Close with the practical answer for a policymaker: join deep agreements whose standards the country can meet, prepare firms to use the rules, and treat entry conditions as a reform program rather than a price to be minimized.

Planned Length and Sources

The section lengths total 14 pages before the title page and references, within the 10- to 15-page requirement. The paper will cite the nine sources from the annotated bibliography plus Lynch (2010) and the Bible, meeting the requirement of 6 to 8 references beyond the course texts. Feedback on the bibliography asked for a source on accession outside Europe; Section V will use the CPTPP's published accession process for that purpose.

References

Baier, S. L., & Bergstrand, J. H. (2007). Do free trade agreements actually increase members' international trade? Journal of International Economics, 71(1), 72-95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2006.02.005

Baldwin, R., & Jaimovich, D. (2012). Are free trade agreements contagious? Journal of International Economics, 88(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2012.03.009

Campos, N. F., Coricelli, F., & Moretti, L. (2019). Institutional integration and economic growth in Europe. Journal of Monetary Economics, 103, 88-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2018.08.001

Dür, A., Baccini, L., & Elsig, M. (2014). The design of international trade agreements: Introducing a new dataset. The Review of International Organizations, 9(3), 353-375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-013-9179-8

Freund, C., & Ornelas, E. (2010). Regional trade agreements. Annual Review of Economics, 2, 139-166. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.economics.102308.124455

Kohl, T., Brakman, S., & Garretsen, H. (2016). Do trade agreements stimulate international trade differently? Evidence from 296 trade agreements. The World Economy, 39(1), 97-131. https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.12272

Lynch, D. A. (2010). Trade and globalization: An introduction to regional trade agreements. Rowman & Littlefield.

Mansfield, E. D., & Milner, H. V. (1999). The new wave of regionalism. International Organization, 53(3), 589-627. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081899551002

Schimmelfennig, F., & Sedelmeier, U. (2004). Governance by conditionality: EU rule transfer to the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Journal of European Public Policy, 11(4), 661-679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350176042000248089