Protection and access to the European market: the case of Mercosur.

Summary The european union's trade relations with third countries are characterized by a hierarchical network of trade preferences. This hierarchy is exercised through a variety of instruments, both within the framework of trade policy and other policies such as the common agricultural policy or the European Coal and Steel Community. The position of each European partner in this hierarchy, as well as the volume of bilateral trade, is determined by the measures applied to imports from that partner. In this thesis, we first construct the European preference pyramid, based on indicators of sectoral tariffs and non-tariff barriers, which allows us to identify precisely the relative positions of European trading partners. In this pyramid, Mercosur occupies an unfavorable position. This position is further weakened by the very composition of its exports to the EU, which are concentrated in sensitive products. The detailed analysis of the evolution of the structure of European imports and of European protection vis-à-vis Mercosur illustrates this observation. The empirical evaluation of the impact of the European preference hierarchy on EU-Mercosur trade relations highlights three main points. First, there is an unfavorable bias against Mercosur in the EU's external relations, indicating the existence of significant potential trade between the two regions. Second, the empirical analysis done at a disaggregated level allows us to identify the main products involved in this potential trade and to highlight the limitations of the gravity approach for analyzing the impact of trade barriers at a very fine level of disaggregation. Third, the empirical analysis highlights the relevance of the theoretical arguments of endogenous protection.