Project

Untangling the Spaghetti Bowl of Regional Integration

This is a joint PhD project between UNU-CRIS and Ghent University.

Date Published
21 May 2026
Expected Start Date
01 Oct 2022
Expected End Date
30 Sep 2026
Project Type
Research
Project Status
Active

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.

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