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This study examines the geostrategic importance of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), discusses its potential trade impacts on African states, and considers whether it could support regional peace. Regional integration is crucial for achieving industrialisation, promoting trade across African borders, and preserving regional peace and security. Inextricably linked to regional integration is a security community comprising a distinct group of individuals for whom the likelihood of large-scale conflict or violence has diminished. A comparative analysis was conducted using Africa's trade patterns, milestones, and achievements during 2015–2017 and 2022–2023. Subsequently, the key causes of insecurity on the African continent were explored, focusing on the Regional Economic Communities and states embroiled in coups during 2020–2023. The findings suggest that African authorities view the AfCFTA positively and believe economic integration may bring about peace. However, African authorities would require a strong continental strategy – supported by robust regional and national programmes – to promote investor confidence and trade, considering Africa's high levels of intercommunal violence, civil unrest, violent extremism, terrorism, and transnational crime. The AfCFTA delayed trade liberalisation to protect Africa's less developed economies, resulting in poor working conditions, intellectual capital loss, and decreased tax collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) and its potential to unleash the development of women in Africa. The envisaged benefits of the AfCFTA include increased trade diversification, regional integration, enhanced human security, increased foreign direct investment and technological advancement. Despite optimism about the prospects of the agreement as a local innovation spearheaded by the African Union, pessimists raise questions about the extent of stakeholder engagement. The agreement must be gender-responsive to enhance outcomes for women cross-border traders. The paper concludes that the lack of gender sensitivity confirms the need to address the specific needs of African women, especially those involved in informal cross-border trade. Hence, for AfCFTA, the policy focus should be on ensuring the formalisation of women who participate in informal trade, thus helping increase access to markets, information and growth opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does industrial policy currently interact with Regional Economic Communities in Africa? This article examines the tension between Regional Economic Communities and state-level industrial policy in Africa through two main problems: (1) how state industrial policies undermine Regional Economic Communities through a crisis of implementation and (2) how Regional Economic Communities undermine industrial policies through crisis of coordination. In discussing these issues, using indicative examples from the regions, especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the East African Community (EAC), the article brings together industrial policy and regional economic integration in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the World Bank shows that in the 21st century, over 100 million Africans have become poor and about 43% of the African population is extremely poor. Notwithstanding, African governments have over the years liberalized their economies through a low tariff regime, in addition to external debt financing of major projects and social intervention programs. However, no study has explored the nexus between trade liberalization, external debt, and income inequality in Africa. Therefore, this study examines the impact of trade liberalization and external debt on income inequality using the Driscoll and Kraay augmented fixed and random effects models on data from 2000 to 2018 for 30 African countries. The findings reveal that, while external debt worsens income inequality, win-win trade liberalization policies could act as instruments for poverty alleviation and income inequality reduction in Africa. The results further show that growth in per capita income exerts a widening effect on income inequality in Africa, implying that income is concentrated in the hands of only a few as the economies grow. The study, therefore, calls for strengthening member countries' commitments to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), cutting down on external debt financing of major developments projects, rolling out more poverty alleviation programs, and enforcing proper regulatory standards to curb illicit financial flows and repatriation of profits by foreign firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study draws inference on the impact of agricultural trade openness, total factor productivity (TFP) growth, and domestic agriculture support on food security in Africa. To retain estimates efficiency and consistency in the presence of complex error terms, we employed the Panel-Corrected-Standard-Error (PCSE) estimator on panel data spanning 2005–2016 for 13 African countries. Results suggest that agricultural trade liberalisation and TFP have significant and favourable effects. Moreover, we find that reducing agricultural support beyond distortion-free levels enhances food security. Further to trade openness, we call for export growth-oriented domestic support anchored on agricultural human-capital development, innovation, and research and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role that trade liberalisation policies play in attracting FDI flows to African economies from 2000 to 2017. This study contributes to the extant literature on the relevance of trade liberalisation policies in developing economies and in particular, African Countries. By employing new measures for trade liberalisation policies, the study estimated a System Generalized Method of Moment model to examine the relationship between trade liberalisation policies and FDI inflows to Africa. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of policies to enhance trade liberalisation would be germane in attracting higher levels of FDI flows to African economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), it is critical to examine its potential success, or failure, particularly in the context of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Another important issue is how the AfCFTA would interface with other Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), the customs unions and monetary communities that already exist in Africa. The free trade agreements that subregions and or countries in Africa enter into are a threat to the AfCFTA because all efforts of African countries should be focusing on boosting intra-African trade in order to ensure that the AfCFTA succeeds and it does not seem feasible to readily 'absorb' the RECs into the AfCFTA. Using results from fieldwork, the paper makes a case that the future of RECs should be resolved so there is sufficient clarity regarding the implementation of the AfCFTA as far as the role of RECs is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of agricultural trade liberalization on agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Africa using panel data for 13 countries from 2005 to 2016. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we analyse the impact of domestic agriculture support in the spirit of the Agreement on Agriculture. Secondly, we draw attention to the South–South versus South–North debate to the agriculture sector. We examine the impact of trade by source, split between trade within and outside Africa. We compute TFP growth for maize and rice using the Malmquist-data envelopment analysis approach. We then use the dynamic fixed effects approach to estimate panel auto-regressive-distributed-lag models. TFP computations show falling growth rates for both maize and rice. Evidence suggests that domestic agriculture support measures have positive output effects but negative productivity effects. We find that reducing trade-distorting agriculture support coupled with good governance significantly increases TFP growth. Accordingly, we appeal that domestic agriculture support is refocused from producer payments to infrastructure development. Furthermore, we document that South–South trade productivity gains match and can surpass South-North Trade. Hence we emphasize increasing intra-Africa agriculture trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has been touted as an important pillar and driver for economic growth, industrialisation and sustainable development in Africa. Among its expected key benefits is the promise to increase the level of intra-African trade by eliminating import duties and other tariffs among member countries, in addition to general trade expansion. However, unlocking the AfCFTA's full potential will largely depend on how the continent is able to restructure its exports, which are poorly diversified and remain highly dependent on primary commodities. Moreover, intra-African trade remains dominated by a few big regional players. To this end, there have been growing fears that the AfCFTA's anticipated gains, and associated losses, are likely to accrue unevenly. Countries with large productive capacities in manufacturing or stronger supply capacities in non-manufactured products may reap more rewards than weaker landlocked and smaller economies, particularly the least developed countries (LDCs). These concerns have led to a number of countries, including Malawi, pushing for special and differential treatment in the implementation of the AfCFTA's provisions on the elimination of import duties and other tariffs. Many LDCs, including Malawi, rely heavily on international trade taxes as a source of government revenue. There is a legitimate concern that such economies are likely to be left grappling with the negative effects of tariff cuts in the form of substantial fiscal revenue loss. This article explores the potential impact of the AfCFTA on LDCs, with a focus on Malawi. It reviews Malawi's intra-African trade position in terms of its export potential and examines the likely impact that the AfCFTA agreement would have on the country's fiscal revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether trade liberalization affects environmental quality (proxied by CO2 emissions) and, if so, whether the trade-induced emissions originate from differences in countries' economic growth, factor endowment or environmental regulations. We used panel data on 30 African countries and the Generalized Method of Moment estimation techniques. Though we found that trade openness is associated with elevated levels of CO2 emissions due to comparative advantage originating from factor endowment (i.e. composition effect), the overall effects of trade are seen to have some beneficial effects on environmental quality. Also, relative economic growth lowers emissions (scale effect) perhaps due to technology transfer. Furthermore, the differences in environmental regulations do not directly affect CO2 emissions while past levels of CO2 emissions significantly increase the current level due to the cumulative effect of CO2 emissions. To achieve a significant reduction in emissions, environmental regulations must be enforced in tandem with growth enhancing and production technology choice policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average tariff data on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We consider different estimation techniques and discuss distinct sets of fixed effects. The PPML regression results indicate that remaining tariffs are significantly negatively correlated with imports throughout the preferred multiplicative models. An FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect. In the specifications that control for country-year effects, the EAC coefficient is positively correlated with imports, and the COMESA and SADC FTA membership show a positive relation to imports within some reduced-sample robustness checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As open economies, African countries need to diversify their exports for economic transformation, sustained growth, and development. Meanwhile, there has been increasing importance of development financing. Following the discussion of theoretical issues on the importance of domestic credit as a potential instrument for overcoming the liquidity constraint of developing countries, as in the case of Africa, this paper empirically explores the determinants of export diversification, with particular attention to domestic credit. The estimation is based on a five-year panel regression analysis for the 1962–2010 period involving 80 countries around the world, of which 62 are developing and 29 African countries, using as covariates variables traditionally viewed as affecting export diversification. System GMM estimates provide robust evidence supporting the importance of domestic credit for African countries, while its role in other countries seems rather marginal. In addition, human capital in the form of schooling, governance as measured by constraint on the chief executive of government, and being land-locked, all exert significant effects, as anticipated, on export diversification among African countries. However, except for governance, appropriately controlling for the interactive effect of domestic credit with 'Africa' yields generally insignificant impacts of these variables, together with domestic credit, on export diversification in non-African countries. These results point to the dominant role of domestic credit in Africa vis-à-vis other countries globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African elephants are being poached at a rate that threatens their minimum viable population. Some economists have argued that flooding the market with a legal supply of ivory will drive prices downward, eroding the incentive for poaching. They suggest that the current international ban on trading ivory is to blame for creating an artificially high price. This paper interrogates these arguments, suggesting that they are inadequate and entail implausible assumptions. The dynamics of supply and demand probably work differently to how pro-trade economists typically argue they work. The paper concludes that the major risk entailed in creating a legal market for ivory is that it may well fail to reduce the price of ivory. Any attempts to legalise the trade therefore risk undermining the efficacy of demand reduction campaigns, in addition to sending confusing signals to the market as to whether trade will again become legitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the effect of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on export diversification in Sub-Saharan Africa. The existing empirical studies suggest that AGOA has had a positive effect on the overallvolumeof trade between Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. However, the economic development literature emphasizes the importance of exportdiversificationfor developing countries; therefore, it is important to understand the effects of AGOA on theextensivemargin of trade (i.e. the number of distinct products a country exports). Our empirical results suggest that AGOA does contribute to export diversification, specifically through its apparel provision. Countries that are eligible for the AGOA apparel provision export not only more apparel products, but also more non-apparel products to the USA. Thus, AGOA contributes to export diversification at the extensive margin of trade with the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]