Beyond Counting Treaties: Using Network Analysis to Reveal the Structural Changes in the Spaghetti Bowl

Since the 1990s, the proliferation of Regional Integration Agreements (RIAs) has created a complex trading environment where countries belong to multiple agreements simultaneously. The Spaghetti Bowl (SB)—a tangled web of overlapping agreements—has primarily been viewed as a visual metaphor. However, this overlooks its multidimensional nature and the interplay between membership and content overlap, lacking an empirical account. This paper presents a more formal, empirically grounded definition of the SB, using a network‐based framework to measure it, capturing its multidimensionality and tracing its regional and temporal evolution with historical RIA data. In contrast to the linear SB growth implied by the traditional count of agreements, our network measures indicate that the SB was essentially nonexistent before 1970. This is followed by three distinct waves of SB growth. Our analysis shows the SB rapidly expanded in the 1970s, became regional in the 1990s and early 2000s, and has become increasingly global since 2010 due to Interregional RIAs. Furthermore, we argue that global entanglement levels are becoming more widespread, even as individual RIAs contribute less to the phenomenon. This recent increase in SB prevalence is underestimated by the method of counting the active RIAs.