Journal of African Trade

The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has been attracting a great deal of attention in academic and policy circles, as well as within the international development community. The growing interest in the AfCFTA partly reflects the fact that the African continent is...

This policy piece surveys the potential of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a historical framework for setting Africa on the path toward structural transformation and sustainable development. After evaluating the part that the landmark continental trade integration reform will play...

The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) was established in 1993 as a crisis management institution on the heels of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. It has since grown into Africa’s foremost regional integration bank, and is playing a critical role in supporting the implementation of...

Growth and development in middle- and low-income countries often come at an environmental cost, but is that trade-off always necessary? This study uses a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the macroeconomic and environmental impact of the world’s most significant plurilateral trade agreement,...

African countries are negotiating the African Continental Free Trade Area with the aim to spearhead global value chain (GVC) trade among African countries as a driver for robust economic growth. This paper evaluates the participation of Sub-Saharan African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in GVC-related...

This paper draws on a general equilibrium poisson pseudo maximum likelihood model augmented by a dynamic capital accumulation to estimate the effects of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) on intra-African trade flows. The empirical results show that the AfCFTA could raise intra-African...

Rules of origin are used to determine a product’s eligibility for preferential tariffs under a free trade agreement and have major implications for the extent of trade under the agreement and the growth of regional value chains. Firms choose to comply with rules of origin when the benefits of trading...

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...

This study provides an ex ante short-run impact analysis of tariff liberalisation in the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) customs union regarding tariff revenue and import values. As with other customs union on the continent,...

This paper sets out to disprove the German philosopher Hegel’s dictum about people learning nothing from history, by looking at the lessons to be learned for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) from the European Union’s experience of regional integration. Since its foundation in 1957, European...