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Abstract

The objective of this work is to study how effective are EU's preferential agreements in granting their partners improved market access. In particular we assess how far preferences are indeed utilised by exporters, when entering the EU's market. The complexity of EU’s protection renders the exercise uneasy. In particular, many EU’s partners are eligible to several different preferential regimes, and the competition between regimes needsto be taken into account. Our results suggest that underutilisation of preferences does not have a large average impact on the protection faced by exporters when acceding the European market. Still, the utilisation of preferences is lower when the preferential margin is small, suggesting that compliance costs are not negligible. Most of all, the utilisation appears weak under the GSP for textile and apparels, and most of all for EBA for the same products. Restrictive rules of origin are here the main suspects.

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