Joint ITIM - UNU-CRIS Seminar by Justine Miller

The proliferation of trade agreements, particularly Regional Integration Agreements (RIAs), since the 1990s has created a complex global trading landscape where countries are often members of multiple agreements simultaneously. This has also resulted in overlapping rules of origin across RIAs. This intricate web of agreements is known as the "spaghetti bowl" (SB) phenomenon. The SB creates additional red tape for firms and can even deter them from utilising the preferential rates agreed upon in RIAs. Moreover, this situation can lead to trade deflection, a problem that rules of origin were supposed to prevent, thus potentially further counteracting the trade gains normally obtained from RIAs. However, despite the widespread interest in the SB, the literature still lacks a universal measure of it. Without it, we cannot reliably estimate the impact that the SB of RIAs has on trade flows. In this paper, we develop a historical measure of the SB since the post-World War II era. We define the SB as the weighted density of the network linking all active RIAs in a given year, capturing both membership and content overlap between RIAs. Using centrality measures, we evaluate where it is most prominent and how individual RIAs contribute to it. Additionally, we construct a country-level network to investigate the link between the SB and trade deflection.

This is a closed event. For further information, please contact Ruben Dewitte (RubenL.Dewitte@UGent.be) and Pascale Vantorre in cc (pvantorre@cris.unu.edu).