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The launching ceremony of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on 21 March 2018 at the Extra-ordinary Summit of the African Union (AU) in Kigali, Rwanda was a major dip...

Among the various tools used to drive export competitiveness, the exchange rate has always taken pre-eminence and has in practice proved to be capable of stimulating export demand ...

The AfCFTA is an ambitious project. Although it is called the Continental Free Trade Area, it is more than a trade in goods agreement. It will also cover trade in services, facilit...

The first important steps towards the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have been taken. The Extraordinary Summit of the African Union (AU), held in...

The text of the Agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) contains several provisions about how this new trade arrangement will co-exist with the Regi...

Formal dispute settlement has not been a feature of intra-African trade. African Governments simply do not litigate against each other. This may be a consequence of many factors: a...

Trade facilitation refers to measures taken by a sovereign nation and its agencies to remove or ameliorate hindrances to cross-border trade of goods and services. In the African co...

The world economy has changed at a faster pace in the last thirty years than at any time in history. The mid-1990s brought on the so-called ‘information age’ and the age of the...

On 8 March 2018, United States President Donald Trump issued two presidential proclamations. These would apply special duties – 25% and 10% respectively – on the imports of hun...

Many exciting developments are occurring in the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain space in the world and in Africa. Much opportunity exists in the continent to lev...

This Trade Brief presents a discussion of the importance of Informal Cross-Border Trading (ICBT) for socio-economic development in the east and southern Africa region. Althoug...

This Working Paper provides a profile of the economy of Rwanda, an African least-developed country (LDC), with a special emphasis on trade and production (i.e. the real economy).&n...

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) announced in November 2017 that its Secretariat had ‘completed the design of the digital free trade area’, and that t...

The 11th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held in Buenos Aires in December 2017, was a disappointment. It has been described in The Economist as “the...

The themes chosen for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos-Klosters, Switzerland are sometimes rather different to the topics the world’s political and economic l...

This Trade Brief takes a look at a feature of African trade arrangements which has given rise to little discussion or concern. The legal instruments underpinning African trade arra...

This paper makes use of a comparative SAM analysis to examine structural shifts in the real economy of South Africa spanning the period from the mid ’90s to the end of the 2000s....

The word indaba has found widespread use throughout Southern Africa. It refers to an important meeting, usually of like-minded people, to decide matters of mutual concern...

On Friday 8 December 2017, high-level negotiators from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) and the European Union (EU) reached a last-minute agreement to ...

Trade in services makes an increasingly important contribution to economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction in countries across the globe. There is also mounting evidence ...