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Abstract
This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of intergovernmental relations on a
country's effort to enforce the objectives of an international environmental agreement on
an open access resource. Intergovernmental interaction allows signatory countries to observe
compliance behavior of other signees and to punish non-compliance by applying bi- and multilateral
sanctions. We use a cross-sectional dataset that contains country level information
about compliance with Article 7 of the 1995 UN Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries.
Our identification strategy combines a spatial autoregressive model with spatial autoregressive
disturbances and an instrumental variable approach. We find a strong positive effect
of other countries' compliance on the individual country's compliance score. These results
suggest that repeated interactions among participants might not only play a role in enforcing
the obligations of an agreement at the community level but also have an impact at the
international level.