Do Subnational Trade Agreements Reduce Trade Barriers? Empirical Evidence from Canadian Provinces
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Canada faces threats to the global trading system, free trade between provinces within Canada remains elusive. Just as slow progress in multilateral trade negotiations has driven a proliferation of bilateral international trade deals, dissatisfaction with lack of progress federally has compelled Canadian provinces to sign bilateral agreements with other willing provincial partners. However, almost nothing is known about the efficacy of this approach. We use a gravity model to empirically investigate the effect of provincial agreements on interprovincial trade flows in Canada. We find that although most agreements facilitated trade between member provinces, others did not. We also find massive provincial trade barriers have declined by 15 percent over the past two decades in Canada.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it