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In Africa, cross-border road transport carries over 80% of intra-regional and inter-regional trade. It provides a critical link between landlocked countries and international marke...

The seventh edition of the ‘Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System’ of the World Customs Organisation (WCO) becomes operational on 1 January 2022. Since its incepti...

Start of trade under the preferential terms of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was announced on 1 January 2021, whilst negotiations to finalise outstanding issues ...

This trade brief will provide an overview of the state of indebtedness (including both public and private debt) for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This will cover the period of 2015-202...

In early 2021, the AfCFTA started to become a reality, albeit an agreement with many details still to be finalized. The objective for this trade brief is to examine the African Con...

This paper investigates movements in services trade restrictions and their impacts on services trade over an eight-year period (2008-2016). It utilises the latest, most globally in...

Most countries broadly aspire to free trade, and the benefits of international trade at times induce situations where governments support domestic industries with the objective of ...

The negotiations for the adoption of the Phase II Protocols of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have started. They will cover investment, intellectual property righ...

Trade remedies and safeguards are key exceptions to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) principles of non-discrimination and transparency through binding commitments on tariffs and ...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, which have restricted the movement of people and lowered economic activity, has had a significantly negative impact on global econo...

Secretariats are standard features of African regional integration arrangements. This will be true of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) too. The extent of all the po...

What is the AfCFTA? The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)[1] is, in addition to being a free trade area, a flagship project of the African Union (AU) in terms of Agenda...

At present, Africa is largely dependent on the rest of the world for automotive component imports, with the exception of the contribution of South Africa. In order to reduce depend...

Cross-border road transport faces numerous barriers which impede seamless and efficient movements and trade flows. Many of the barriers can be directly linked to the fragmentation ...

State Parties’ trade-related rights and obligations are derived from international agreements. Governments’ implementation of trade agreements involves domestic measures taken ...

On the last day of December 2020, the South African Department of Home Affairs published two draft policies for public comment. The one is a Draft One-stop Border Post Policy, the ...

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is an ambitious undertaking that brings together 1.3 billion people in 55 African countries to create the world’s largest free tr...

Investment facilitation has increasingly become a hot topic in international regional and national investment policy-making discussions. According to the United Nations Conference ...

Trade in services (mostly through modes 1 and 4) has great potential gender-specific benefits. These include expanding the participation of women in the exports of services, a...

This paper employs both informal and formal analysis of panel trade and tariff data to determine the extent to which the gaining of preferential access to a market actually leads t...