Regional trade agreements dance card.

Summary The difficulties of multilateralism have renewed interest in regionalism in trade agreements. With which partners does a country have an economic interest in signing an agreement? What would be the gains from doing so when no such agreement exists? On the contrary, are there gains to be had from signing agreements for which there is no economic interest in the first place? These are the questions that the study reported in this Letter addresses. Its results show that the decision to exit existing agreements, even if they are not justified by an economic interest, causes losses, and that there are still gains to be expected from signing new agreements for which there is an economic interest. Nevertheless, the gains to be expected from a regional agreement, such as the one pushed by China since November 2012 in response to the 11-way Trans-Pacific Partnership, are diminishing over time. Because it has become a player of global importance, it is no longer so much with its neighbors that China has an interest in signing agreements, but with other more distant global powers such as the European Union.