Dealing with the Proliferation of Bilateral Trade Agreements: Consolidation, Multilateralization, Harmonization, or Dilution?

Jayant Menon ()
Additional contact information
Jayant Menon: Asian Development Bank

No 123, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: Bilateral free trade agreements (BTAs) have been proliferating. The outcome of this proliferation of often overlapping BTAs and plurilateral free trade agreements is described as the spaghetti bowl effect or, in the Asian region, the noodle bowl effect. This is costly and welfare-reducing. How should this situation be remedied? This paper evaluates the various options proposed in dealing with the spaghetti bowl. A general limitation of these proposals is their tendency to group all kinds of BTAs together and treat them as a homogeneous group. Thus, the proposals ignore underlying differences in motivation in the formation of BTAs. To overcome this, the paper develops ataxonomy for classifying BTAs by motivation before considering the effectiveness of the different remedies proposed. Each proposal has its pros and cons, and can cater to different types of BTAs. Thus, a combination of the various proposals may be warranted, even in the event of an expeditious and bona fide conclusion to the Doha Round.

Keywords: bilateral free trade agreements; noodle bowl effect; proliferation; remedies; spaghetti bowl effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F15 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2008-09-01
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/dealing-prolifera ... -multilateralization Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0123

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().