We look at the effect of the WTO on stabilizing international trade using both a fixed-effects and an event study approach. Our results show that WTO members experience lower trade volatilties in a predictable and integrated system. In addition, we focus on the trade volatility comovement among countries in a multilateral framework. Previous research has mainly focused on WTO membership in a bilateral trade framework, which only allows interactions between two trade partners without considering any possible influence from other countries. A bilateral trade framework does not fully capture the effect of WTO membership, nor does it investigate why the multilateral platform of the WTO should exist. With a unique setup estimating interactions among multiple trading dyads, we find strong evidence supporting positive correlation or comovement of trade volatilities across trading pairs. Such a comovement appears much stronger among WTO members than between WTO and non-WTO members. Due to the feedback mechanism among dyads in a multilateral framework, such as the WTO, bilateral trade stability may further stabilize the global trade. Our results remain robust to a battery of sensitivity checks.

我们使用固定效应和事件研究方法研究了WTO对稳定国际贸易的影响。我们的结果表明，WTO成员在可预测和集成的系统中遇到的贸易波动性较低。此外，我们专注于在多边框架内国家之间的贸易波动性联动。先前的研究主要关注双边贸易框架中的WTO成员资格，该框架仅允许两个贸易伙伴之间的互动，而没有考虑其他国家的任何可能影响。双边贸易框架没有完全体现出加入世贸组织的影响，也没有调查为什么应该存在世贸组织的多边平台。通过独特的设置来估算多个交易双峰之间的相互作用，我们发现有力的证据支持跨交易对的贸易波动率呈正相关或共同变动。与世贸组织成员和非世贸组织成员相比，世贸组织成员之间的这种合作似乎要强大得多。由于在诸如WTO之类的多边框架中两性之间的反馈机制，双边贸易稳定可能会进一步稳定全球贸易。对于一系列的敏感性检查，我们的结果仍然很可靠。