Untangling the Spaghetti Bowl of Regional Integration

We study the global tangle created by the proliferation of Regional trade agreements since World War II, a phenomenon known as the Spaghetti Bowl of Regional Integration. While this metaphor gives an intuition of how intertwined the near 700 active agreements are, it does not reflect the complexity of the underlying phenomenon. In this project, we argue that a more rigorous, empirically-grounded definition is needed to understand the phenomenon. We study how it has formed, what effects it has, and how it may continue to develop.