In rapidly expanding global and regional preferential trade agreements (PTA) networks, policy‐makers are keen to situate their countries in a better position, believing that a better position in PTA networks will help their economies trade more and grow faster. In this paper, we provide a theory that explains how changes in countries' PTA network positions affect their trade performance. We argue that a dense and deep “neighbor network” provides a country with a wide access to global value chains, better protection to investment, and strong credibility to their policy commitments. To measure trade performance, we compute value‐added exports at the country, year, and industry level across 43 countries, 56 industries, and 15 years (2000–14). The estimation of network position effects is done by panel fixed‐effects methods and the sample‐splitting and cross‐fitting double machine‐learning method. The findings show that as a country's neighbors have deeper and wider PTA networks, the country's value‐added exports grow faster. Also, the industry‐level analysis shows that sectors heavily engaging in the fragmentation of production stages exhibit faster growth with the improvement of neighbor networks.

中文翻译：

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您的邻居为何重要：优惠贸易协议网络中的职位以及全球价值链中的出口增长

在迅速扩展的全球和区域优惠贸易协定（PTA）网络中，政策制定者渴望将自己的国家置于更好的位置，相信在PTA网络中拥有更好的地位将有助于其经济贸易更多，增长更快。在本文中，我们提供了一种理论，解释了国家PTA网络位置的变化如何影响其贸易绩效。我们认为，密集而深入的“邻居网络”为一个国家提供了进入全球价值链的广泛途径，对投资的更好保护以及对其政策承诺的强大信誉。为了衡量贸易绩效，我们计算了43个国家，56个行业和15年（2000-14年）的国家，年度和行业水平的增值出口。网络位置效应的估计是通过面板固定效应方法以及样本分解和交叉拟合双重机器学习方法完成的。调查结果表明，随着一个国家的邻国拥有更广泛的PTA网络，该国家 增值出口增长更快。此外，行业层面的分析表明，随着邻居网络的改善，大量参与生产阶段分散化的行业显示出更快的增长。