Digital and environmental policies are increasingly seen as complementary, both domestically and internationally. In international trade policy, digital and environmental issues have been and continue to be discussed in multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and in plurilateral negotiations on preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This chapter takes a closer look at the design and impact of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs. It begins with a brief comparative overview of domestic digital and environmental policies in Latin America, followed by a discussion of the design features of Latin American PTAs. The final section provides an empirical analysis of the impact of these design features on trade. While there is considerable heterogeneity across Latin American countries and PTAs, the analysis suggests a positive relationship between digital and environmental policies. Latin American countries with more ambitious domestic digital policies tend to have more ambitious domestic environmental policies, and vice versa. Similarly, Latin American countries with a broader coverage of digital issues in their PTAs also tend to cover a broader range of environmental issues in their PTAs, and vice versa. The empirical results suggest that the presence and design of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs have no statistically significant impact on the volume and composition of imports. For exports, the analysis suggests that digital provisions in PTAs tend to increase flows, while the opposite is true for environmental provisions.

Technical barriers to trade (TBT) and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures make up the core of non-tariff measures (NTMs) both within the multilateral trade policy regime, administrated by the World Trade Organization (WTO), and within the preferential trade policy regime, represented by preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Technical barriers to trade and SPS provisions have been present in PTAs since the mid-1950s and have grown in importance since the WTO TBT and SPS Agreements entered into force in 1995. This chapter assesses TBT and SPS measures in selected PTAs and outlines likely trends. The first section focuses on the design and evolution of TBT and SPS measures present in three recent mega-regional PTAs: the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The second section examines likely trends in the development and application of TBT and SPS provisions in PTAs with the expectation that some of these provisions will eventually be multilateralised.

The chapter explores data-related provisions in preferential trade agreements and analyzes trends and patterns in their evolution based on a comprehensive dataset. The chapter explores in particular indicators aggregated from the data that attempt to capture various salient dimensions of the data flow–related provisions in PTAs and uses those indicators to enquire into the trends over time, exploring the rule-makers’ roles through both text-as-data analyses and manual coding of data-related design features. The chapter concludes by outlining possible next research avenues in the area of digital trade governance.

The last couple of years have been an eventful time for trade policy and in particular for major preferential trade agreements (PTAs), such as the so-called mega-regionals. Early 2016, twelve Pacific Rim countries, including Canada and the United States (USA), signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Around the same time, Canada and the European Union (EU) agreed at the level of negotiators to conclude the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Finally, the USA and the EU continued their efforts to find common ground in the negotiations towards the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty.