Sectoral Approaches to African Political Economy

Tsowou, Komi; Ajambo, Eunice

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-38922-2_35

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) aims to create better integrated markets. Through the reduction or removal of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, the landmark continental free trade area will enable the levels of economies of scale and investment necessary to develop wide-reaching regional value chains and to support the continent's transformational industrialization (UNECA, 2017;Tsowou and Ajambo, 2020;World Bank, 2020). Recent estimates from the World Bank (2020) suggest that, by 2035, the AfCFTA could boost Africa's total exports by 29%, intra-continental trade by more than 81%, and Africa's exports to the rest of the world by 19%, with most of the gains accrued to the manufacturing sector.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaping the AfCFTA Potential Through Well-Functioning Rules of Origin

Tsowou¹,

Davis²

2021

JAT

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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 facilitation procedures. If these issues continue unchecked, they could harm the realization of AfCFTA ambitions. Here, we first discuss the economics of preferential RoOs, highlighting their associated benefits and costs within and beyond the African context. Second, we focus on the implementation of RoOs under the AfCFTA. We contend that cost-effective implementation is crucial to the AfCFTA RoO regime for production hubs to benefit from integrated African markets. Capacity building, the adoption of new technologies, and the establishment of effective institutional mechanisms will be important to track progress on RoO implementation and ensure high preference-utilization rates under the AfCFTA. These efforts shall be complemented by targeted support to the least developed countries and to small and medium enterprises. Finally, we recommend a set of actions to ensure the impartial, transparent, predictable, consistent, and cost-effective implementation of the AfCFTA RoOs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaping the AfCFTA Potential Through Well-Functioning Rules of Origin

Tsowou¹,

Davis²

2021

JAT

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Analyzing the African Continental Free Trade Area (the AfCFTA) from an Informality Perspective: A Beautiful House in the Wrong Neighborhood

Kwasi Tieku,

Yakohene

2023

Global Studies Quarterly

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The article critically explores the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) from an informality perspective. The informality perspective sees unofficial rules, norms, practices, processes, actors, and decision-making structures as driving forces of the social world. They are ontologically prior to and building blocks of their formal counterparts. From this viewpoint, the failure to design the AfCFTA from the informal economy baseline makes it an unfit trade agreement for the African continent. Those who drafted the agreement, its supplementary protocols and annexes, and the decision-makers who signed as well as ratified them neglected the informal trading actors and unregistered enterprises in Africa. Rather than building the agreement around unregistered small-to-medium-scale enterprises, operated mostly by women and the youth, the AfCFTA and its legal instruments envisioned a utopian African trade market without them. The drafters and decision-makers of the AfCFTA seem to operate on the basic principle of no formalization and no gain from the free trade agreement. The result is a serious mismatch. The formally oriented AfCFTA is supposed to govern the largely informal African trading ecosystems. The failure to mainstream the informal economy in the AfCFTA makes the African free trade agreement look like, to use a house metaphor, a beautifully constructed house located in the wrong neighborhood. The article substantiates this claim and shows its implications for the Pan-African integration project and the study of international relations.

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Sectoral Approaches to African Political Economy

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Reaping the AfCFTA Potential Through Well-Functioning Rules of Origin

Reaping the AfCFTA Potential Through Well-Functioning Rules of Origin

Analyzing the African Continental Free Trade Area (the AfCFTA) from an Informality Perspective: A Beautiful House in the Wrong Neighborhood

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