International law and international agreements are generally influenced by stronger states, which impose their regulatory concepts on weaker ones. International economic law is no exception. The similarity of provisions in various agreements, including those concluded by the US in the 1990s and 00s, is striking. The structure, scope and enforceability of the agreements are very similar, meaning that the US was powerful enough to promote its economic interests. Parties with economic power have thus shown lawmaking attitudes in regional trade agreements for years. By using text-mining methods, DELab UW researchers Dr. hab. Magdalena Słok-Wódkowska, and Łukasz Nawaro managed to distinguish between rule makers and rule takers. In the study they analysed regional trade agreements. The methodology used is based on the work of Alschner et al. (2018) and work on text mining, taking into account the specificity of legal texts. The text of the agreement was transformed into strings of several words. It was checked where such a string occurred for the first time and assigned to the appropriate group (one of the rule-making countries, one of the contracting parties, insignificant words, only/first occurrence). For each chapter, the percentage of word sequences belonging to a given group was counted. On this basis, the authors analysed whether, in the new chapters where countries regulate the digital economy, the roles of countries that create and those that copy regulatory solutions were preserved.
The study was prepared as part of the NCN project „International economic law in times of digital transformation: trends, regulatory models and specific solutions for e‑commerce and data”
