The international trading system has had a dire decade. There has been a stunning drop-off in the growth of global trade, and the most recent World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference did little, if anything, to halt the multilateral trading system’s decline. Yet anticorruption policy’s place in international trade negotiations has never been stronger. Many of the most prominent regional free trade agreements (FTAs) that have either come into force or been the subject of intense negotiations over the last half-decade have featured remarkably strong anticorruption provisions. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which came into force in 2020 as a replacement for NAFTA, included entirely new anticorruption protections alongside only modest, technocratic tweaks to actual barriers to cross-border trade. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the post-2016 replacement for the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), includes almost all of the anticorruption provisions that the U.S. championed in the TPP. The negotiations for an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), though much maligned for their failure to coalesce around meaningful trade liberalization, nevertheless produced a “Fair Economy” pillar that includes substantial initiatives aimed at fighting corruption. And these are not the only examples: Indeed, there has been a general increase in anticorruption provisions in FTAs and bilateral investment treaties.

Of course, lumping all of these different provisions together is a bit misleading, because the “anticorruption” provisions in FTAs take a wide variety of forms. Many, including the anticorruption provisions of the USMCA and the CPTPP, commit members to adopting laws that either directly criminalize certain behavior (bribery, facilitation payments, etc.) or require that firms adopt transparency measures, such as regular financial disclosures. Other FTAs, like the IPEF or the World Customs Organization’s Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Program, focus on capacity building through information sharing, technical assistance, and training programs. Still others, like the African Continental Free Trade Area (which is still being negotiated), attempt to tackle corruption in trade through measures like simplifying and automating the customs process. Yet despite this diversity, it is fair to say that anticorruption is now firmly part of the international trade agenda—thanks in large part to sustained advocacy by pro-transparency and anticorruption advocates since the 1990s.

While the incorporation of anticorruption provisions in FTAs has obvious symbolic importance, we don’t yet know as much about the practical impact of these provisions. This is partly because it’s just too soon to make such assessments: Other than a few exceptional cases, the inclusion of anticorruption language in FTAs is a relatively recent phenomenon). Very few studies have engaged in empirical assessments of how FTA anticorruption commitments actually fare as anticorruption tools in practice. But the limited evidence we do have appears encouraging:

One of the first large sample-size empirical studies of FTAs as anticorruption mechanisms, released last year, evaluated 279 free trade agreements between a sample of 150 countries and customs unions during a period from 1995 to 2015, a sample which includes the vast majority of free-trade agreements where parties made “WTO+” commitments on subjects outside of traditional trade liberalization measures, including anticorruption provisions. The study found that (controlling for other factors that might affect corruption, such as GDP, bureaucratic quality, political stability, and political legitimacy) countries that entered into an FTA that included specific commitments to incorporate anticorruption measures into national law (i.e. criminalizing bribery, requiring anti-money laundering disclosures, banning facilitation payments, etc.), had a modest but statistically significant correlation with improvements in a country’s ranking on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), over and above the small improvement associated with a state’s entrance into an FTA in the first place. And countries that joined many such FTAs saw an even more notable improvement, especially when the FTAs were with relatively less corrupt partners.

While these preliminary results are encouraging, we should be careful not to overestimate the efficacy of anticorruption provisions in FTAs. Where FTAs lack effective dispute resolution systems, member governments might not comply with the requirements, or might obey the letter but not the spirit of their commitments. It is also possible that many of these provisions could, through inconsistent draftsmanship across agreements, produce conflicting obligations which would make it difficult for states and third parties to actually cleanly define a governments’ anticorruption obligations under a given set of FTAs. Finally, and most importantly, we should be mindful of the fact that this is only one study. Until a larger body of research exists, we must temper our optimism about the possibility that anticorruption and transparency commitments in trade negotiations will have a meaningful positive impact in the global fight against corruption.

With those important caveats, this preliminary result does suggest, however, that anticorruption provisions in FTAs could have a small but meaningful impact in combating official misconduct. Civil society and government actors should continue to engage with international trade policy as a potential vehicle for anticorruption initiatives. And researchers should take a closer look at FTA anticorruption provisions to see if these early results prove robust.