Depth, ambition and width in regional economic organizations

Many have argued that international agreements face a trade-off between width and depth: that is, that having more members (and greater diversity among those members) tends to lead to lower levels of co-operation within an organization. Recent theoretical literature has called into question the nature of this trade-off, and has even questioned its existence. In this contribution, we seek to uncover the empirical relationship between width and depth using a cross-sectional dataset on regional economic organizations (REOs). We use expert survey data to capture information on key dimensions that taps into the depth of co-operation. We demonstrate that there is no empirical relationship between the number of members in an organization and the depth of co-operation. However, organizations with more members tend to have more ambitious goals and broader scope. This may contribute to the perception of a depth and breadth tradeoff. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.