Africa's Challenges in International Trade and Regional Integration: What Role for Europe?

by Phil Alves, Peter Draper and Nkululeko Khumalo
SAIIA Occasional Paper, No 32, May 2009
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EU-Africa Project
The challenges that Africa faces in trade and regional integration are legion, and well documented. In this brief we attempt to summarise them against the backdrop of Africa's broad development priorities.  We then explore the ‘demand' and ‘supply' sides of Africa's trade problems, noting where and how the European Union may improve its efforts to assist. This is a wide-ranging discussion covering World Trade Organisation negotiating dynamics, official development assistance, trade facilitation, standards, infrastructure and so on. This necessarily limits the amount of detail we can offer on each area, but provides an important mapping of the problems.

The last part of the brief contains an assessment of the role of regional integration and Economic Partnership Agreements in bringing about an improvement in Africa's trade and broader economic performance. Regional integration in Africa is beset by massive constraints: Economic Partnership Agreements offer help in some areas, but threaten what progress is being made in many others.

SAIIA sincerely thanks those who acted as peer reviewers for these papers.