Ministerial Declarations and Decisions: Text-As-Data Approach to Assess Converging Economic Policies in the WTO

How do the ministerial declarations change over time? Ministerial meetings are one of the most influential gatherings in WTO for debating how to proceed in world trade. These gatherings are important for states since they propose their agenda during meetings. To examine whether these statements change over time and result with convergence or divergence among the statements of countries will enhance our knowledge about the transformation of WTO. How ministerial statements are distant from the ministerial decision constitutes the second part of the research. In ministerial meetings some governments might be more eligible to shape meetings to discuss certain issues on world free trade. Countries, nevertheless, are not always successful in shaping the agenda and pushing other countries to decide on what they have proposed. Introducing the similarities of statements and ministerial decisions will help us to asses who forms the governance of WTO and whether this changes over time. To investigate the changes in trade policy positions and who are the main agenda setters in WTO, I will create a new dataset by using quantitative text analysis. By using ministerial declarations and ministerial decisions from 1996 to 2017, I will be able to measure the policy offerings of statements and will asses how these statements are distinct from each other as well as from the ministerial decisions. I will establish the Dictionary of Economy and Trade Policy which will permit to model and categorize different free trade issues covered by different countries. Text-as-Data offers an innovative approach to understand the primary and one of the most valuable sources for political data, texts, in detail. Moreover, comparing and contrasting the changes in economic policy decisions across time and space is an important empirical quest for decrypting the transformation of global trade governance.