Fifteen countries recently signed the RCEP and formed the world’s largest trade bloc between some of the globe’s largest and fastest growing economies. Employing a text-as-data analysis, Nicholas Frank systematically compares the text of RCEP to the previous agreements of RCEP’s members to determine the sources of language in RCEP and investigates why particular treaty text is replicated more frequently relative to others. The results indicates that language derived from the multiparty and multicontinental trade agreements of the United States, a state not involved in the RCEP negotiations, accounted for a disproportionate share of the finalized text. These findings highlight the temporal dimension of power asymmetries as well as the importance of treaty design itself in the diffusion of regulatory norms and suggest that specific trade agreements serve as reference points for subsequent agreements.

Nicholas Frank is a Laureate Research Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance. Prior to this, he was an Associate Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. Nicholas specializes in the political economy of trade, investment, and development. He employs econometrics, inferential network approaches, and text-as-data techniques in his research.

Nicholas has consulted for the ITC and OECD on inclusive trade and industrial policy respectively. Before joining ANU, he worked at the WTO and ICTSD on a variety of trade and development topics including trade negotiations, regional integration, value chain upgrading, trade and gender, and services sector development. Nicholas holds a PhD in Regulation and Global Governance from the Australian National University, an MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics, as well as Honours in International Relations and a Bachelor of Commerce (PPE) from the University of Cape Town. He has undertaken graduate quantitative methods training at Purdue and the University of Michigan.