This study attempts to empirically determine if the spaghetti bowl phenomenon (hereinafter referred to as the SBP) exists among the 21 member APEC trade bloc. The SBP phenomenon claims that the crisscrossing of multiple free trade agreements (FTAs) of a country with partner economies can lead to...

Recent calls for reform of the rules of origin in preferential trade arrangements such as the GSP as well as in many free trade agreements between developed and developing countries have focused almost exclusively on the need to relax the requirements of these rules. Without fundamentally...

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between the rules of origin (ROO) governing preferential trade regimes and trade and investment flows. We focus on the regimes in the key markets of the EU and the US. Firstly we look at overall imports, where we do not find liberal ROO to be a key...

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Rules of Origin (RoOs) determine the conditions for the application of the Agreement's tariff preferences. The effectiveness of existing preferential trade agreements within the continent is undermined by heterogeneous RoO regimes and costly trade...