The Evolution of Trade Agreements by Bertelsmann Foundation

The interactive visualization reveals the global evolution of trade agreements from 1948 until 2009. The tool not only displays the increase in the number of agreements and country connections over time, but also uses color to visualize the sharp rise in average depth of commitments since the 1990s. Grouped by continents, intra-continental agreements appear outside of the disc, while the inside shows inter-continental agreements. The underlying dataset (Dür et al., 2014) comprises 587 preferential trade agreements, among them customs unions and free trade agreements.