Rules of Origin across African Regional Trading Agreements: A Landscape with Measures to Address Challenges at Harmonization☆

DOI

10.2991/jat.k.201224.001How to use a DOI?

Keywords

AfCFTA; rules of origin; product-specific rules of origin; regime-wide rules of origin; compliance costs

Abstract

To become operational, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) must harmonize Rules of Origin (ROO) across Africa’s Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) along two dimensions: regime-wide rules and product-specific rules. This paper describes and evaluates these ROO across the major multiple-membership PTAs engaged in these harmonization negotiations. These PTAs include: The Agadir Agreement, the Greater Arab Free Trade Area, the Common Market for East and South Africa, the East Africa Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community. To this list we add available regime-wide information on two Free-trade-areas (FTAs): the Tripartite FTA and the AfCFTA. The paper makes three contributions. It provides the first comprehensive description of regime-wide rules (RWR) and productspecific rules (PSR) separately across the main African PTAs. This landscape is built up from the complementary work based on the rules of origin facilitator¹ that has categorized the 850 textually distinct PSR across six selected African PTAs. Second, the paper proposes metrics to evaluate differences along three dimensions: (i) wording-based text analysis; (ii) distance measures to indicate regulatory overlap; (iii) ordinal index to measure restrictiveness based of RWR and PSR. Third, it proposes a dashboard for negotiators incorporating the classifications and measures developed in the text along with other indicators.

Copyright

© 2020 African Export-Import Bank. Publishing services by Atlantis Press International B.V.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - JOUR
AU  - Julien Gourdon
AU  - Dzmitry Kniahin
AU  - Jaime de Melo
AU  - Mondher Mimouni
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/29
TI  - Rules of Origin across African Regional Trading Agreements: A Landscape with Measures to Address Challenges at Harmonization☆
JO  - Journal of African Trade
SP  - 96
EP  - 108
VL  - 8
IS  - 1
SN  - 2214-8523
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/jat.k.201224.001
DO  - 10.2991/jat.k.201224.001
ID  - Gourdon2020
ER  -