earticle

영어

Recently bilateral free trade agreements(BTAs) have been proliferating. The result of this proliferation is described as the spaghetti bowl effect. This is costly and welfare-reducing. How should the damage of this effect be eliminated and reduced? Today, all countries which are pursuing the multi-track FTAs have a high interest in eliminating this effect. This paper assesses various approaches proposed to eliminate spaghetti bowl effect. But the general limitation of these proposals is their tendency to group all kinds of FTAs together and treat them as a homogeneous group. Namely. these approaches ignore underlying differences in motivation in forming FTAs. Thus, this paper classifies FTAs by motivation before considering the effectiveness of the various approaches, and then assesses their ability to eliminate the spaghetti bowl effect.