From Noodle Bowls to Alphabet Soup

Since the 1990s, the growing weight of East Asia and the stagnant Doha Round have conspired to prompt the globe’s largest trading partners to reconsider their respective trade policies (Messerlin 2012). The resulting proliferation has been the source of much concern as the resulting “noodle bowl” of crisscrossing FTAs is particularly fragile. Each party’s competitiveness increasingly hinges on the free-flow of intermediary goods prompted by way of unilateral tariff-cutting removed from any WTO initiative and often absent any top-down coordination (Baldwin 2008). The various strands of this so-called “noodle bowl” primarily bound smaller economies to larger ones as even limited agreements between larger markets have proved particularly elusive (Table 11.1).