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tralac’s Daily News selection: 29 October 2015
The selection: Thursday, 29 October
Today, in Cape Town: tralac's BLNS Trade Governance and Remedies workshop
Featured tweet, @jpstijns: Africa allocates 94.7% of its foreign investment flows in Europe, Europe 0.4% in Africa [CBRE report]
SADC-EU Political Dialogue: outcomes
The meeting discussed pertinent issues affecting the two regions and how to enhance collaboration in programmes that can generate investment, create jobs, boost economic growth and promote peace and security in the two regions. Discussions centred on implementation of the Revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan for the SADC region and on the European Commission Investment Plan for Europe also referred to as “Junckers Plan” or EU Infrastructure and Investment Plan. The meeting also discussed how to enhance collaboration to address common challenges such as migration and climate change. [Download the communiqué]
EU Fact Sheets on support to SADC: SADC liberalises trade in services with support from the EU, Safer SADC agricultural commodities and agro-processed goods, Evolution – or revolution – in SADC payments systems?
EU-Southern Africa trade deal to be signed in Botswana in May 2016 (Bloomberg)
This study first shows the relevance of GVCs and global production networks in general, after which it considers the challenges of fragmentation for ACP countries. It analyses the role of GVCs in modern trade and development and then shows the problems faced by ACP countries wishing to integrate into GVCs and upgrade within them. Accordingly, it clusters the heterogeneous ACP countries into groups with similar characteristics before asking what they can do to integrate into value chains, whether global or regional. The final section summarises the policy options developed in the course of the analysis. [The authors: Peter Draper, Andreas Freytag, Susanne Fricke]
EU's trade in goods with ACP states: excluding South Africa, including South Africa
India, Africa bright spots in global economy: key takeaways from PM Modi’s IAFS speech (FirstPost)
Much of India’s development priorities and Africa’s vision for its future are aligned, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today at the third India-Africa Forum Summit in New Delhi on Thursday, announcing a slew of measures to support the continent. "We will open our doors more; we will expand tele-education; and we will continue to build institutions in Africa," he said. Ever since the first such summit happened in 2008, India has given $7.4bn in concessional credit to Africa, and also a $1.2bn grant. More than this, India is building infrastructure on the continent. According to the prime minister, nearly 25,000 young Africans were trained and educated in India in the last three years alone. [Modi’s speech: Full text]
Africa-India: Facts and Figures 2015 (UNECA)
FDI: In 2013, 16% of India’s total foreign direct investment stocks were in Africa. Altogether, India has the second largest FDI stocks in Africa after the United States of America. However, in terms of relative importance of Africa in the countries’ total FDI stocks, India is outstanding. In the same year, 16% of India’s total FDI stocks were in Africa, while Brazil and China had 9% and 0.8% of their FDI stocks in the continent, respectively.
Trade: In 2014 Africa accounted for 11% of India’s exports and 9% of its imports. Since 2010, India’s exports to and imports from Africa increased by 93% and 28%, respectively. In the meantime, Africa’s share from India’s total exports has increased from 8.1% to 10.9%.
President Museveni to India-Africa summit: ‘eliminate trade barriers, facilitate trade’
The Third India-Africa Forum Summit: resources from SAIIA
North Africans discuss regionalisation and the CFTA (UNECA)
The Economic Commission for Africa yesterday launched, in Rabat, a North African private sector workshop on the challenges of trade integration within the context of the African Free Trade Agreement. As the economic cost of “non integration” is becoming increasingly unbearable for North Africa, participants focused on the sub-regions’ existing opportunities. Organized as part of the 6th North Africa Development Forum, this workshop made it possible to gather representatives of the North African private sectors.
SADC should put extra emphasis on the implementation of the Technical Regulation Framework in the TBT Annex to the SADC Protocol on Trade, and it will certainly be beneficial if the issue of conformity assessment by way of pre-shipment inspection in the form of CBCA/PVoC programmes is added to discussions about the implementation of the Technical Regulation Framework. As part of such a discussion SADC should also consider whether the dispute resolution mechanisms currently available to exporters are sufficient or should be addressed within the SADC context, where there is currently no functioning SADC Tribunal and where national courts cannot normally provide judicial remedies in these instances. [The author: Abrie du Plessis] [Access the latest tralac newsletter: here]
Preliminary baseline analysis of Mozambique’s conformity with trade facilitation agreements (SPEED)
Mozambique is in a unique position amongst its southern African neighbours as the only SADC country with no overlapping regional trade agreements. Mozambique has done well in meeting its SADC obligations, as one of only 3 countries to have aligned with the SADC Model Act and is only the one applying the SADC Common Tariff Nomenclature at the time of the last SADC Customs Audit. Mozambique can enhance its economic competitiveness by undertaking steps suggested in the AU’s Action Plan for Boosting Intra-African Trade and in seeking greater conformity with the trade facilitation procedures under its sole regional-level trade agreement, the Southern African Development Community. Mozambique must carefully pick and choose how to deploy the efforts of its negotiating teams in order to glean the greatest gain from the myriad trade agreements already in place and in the process of negotiation. [The author: Daniel Plunkett]
KRA in race for new cargo scanners, upgrades to seal revenue loopholes (Business Daily)
Cargo scanners in all the main ports of entry are set for upgrade and additional ones installed as the Kenya Revenue Authority moved to seal tax leaks amid shortfalls in revenue collection. The taxman said the existing scanners would be upgraded to provide sharper image quality and boost their speed and detection capabilities. “You will be required to establish a modernised customs management solution having a centralised supervision system with multi-functionalities to realise centralised status monitoring of scanning operations, auditing onsite operation and data mining of the inspection data generated by the scanners,” John Njiraini, KRA commissioner general, said as he invited firms interested in the project.
Payments on COMESA platform hit Sh185m (Business Daily)
Payments made through a regional cross-border transfer system hit Sh185 million in the first six months of the year, indicating rising public awareness and uptake of a platform introduced to ease trade. The Regional Payment and Settlement System (REPSS) said it handled real-time bank transfers totalling $1.69 million and €63,656.71 in the half year to June. COMESA launched the platform in October 2012 to ease regional trade by offering same-day settlement of funds within the bloc. Kenya plugged into the payments system in 2014. The platform has so far interconnected banks in eight member countries including DR Congo, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Swaziland, Uganda, and Zambia.
Zimbabwe: Manufacturing capacity utilisation slips to 34,4% (News Day)
Capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector declined to 34,4% in 2015 attributed to capital constraints and antiquated machinery, a new report by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries has shown. Last year, capacity utilisation was 36,5%. Mazambani-Mutaferi said on the export front, Zambia remained the top destination for Zimbabwean goods followed by South Africa, Malawi and Mozambique. She, however, said the reason companies were not exporting was lack of export incentives, high cost of doing business, limited capacity and the costs associated with exporting. Mazambani-Mutaferi listed the problems being faced by companies in exporting as complexities on procedures, delays, corruption at the borders and failing to meet customer requirements.
Botswana: concept note for Vienna Programme of Action for LLDCs workshop (MTI)
REC updates: ECOWAS ministers adopt disaster management model, IGAD countries resolve to tackle human trafficking, EAC health, safety rules harmonised, Angola hosting meeting of SADC Central Bank Governors
Information sharing will boost intra-African trade - expert (GhanaWeb)
A UN trade expert, Mr Frederick Alipui, has urged the African Union Commission to expedite action on the call made by Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, Minister of Trade and Industry for an African trade information sharing portal to boost intra-African trade. He recalled that in the 1980s the then OAU sought to create a “Pan- African Trade Information System (PANAFTIS) in its quest to set up an Africa-wide platform that would link up all trade information networks of member states of the various regional trade blocs. He said the existence of such a platform would propel the AU’s agenda of boosting intra-African trade and thereby achieve the target goal of creating a Continental Free Trade Area by the 2017.
India's trade data: the importance of data dissemination (Mint)
While broad patterns in Indian trade are rather well known and well studied, what we’ve largely lacked so far is a mechanism to track Indian imports at a much more granular level. Now, thanks to the efforts of the customs department, which uploads commodity-wise and port-wise trade data on a daily basis, and activist and open data enthusiast Srinivas Kodali , who has scraped and compiled the data, it is possible to look at Indian exports and imports at a much more granular level. Kodali released the above data last week through the Datameet platform during the Open Data Week celebrations. Data is available for trade between 8 August and 17 October 2015, and provides us some very interesting insights into the way India trades.
Bright Lights, Big Cities: measuring national and sub-national economic growth in Africa from outer space, with an application to Kenya and Rwanda (World Bank)
This paper uses the night lights (satellite imagery from outer space) approach to estimate growth in and levels of subnational 2013 gross domestic product for 47 counties in Kenya and 30 districts in Rwanda.
UN agencies warn of deteriorating food security in Southern Madagascar
Ethiopia experiencing ‘worst drought in 30 years’ due to El Niño conditions – UN report
Zimbabwe's tobacco exports hit $500m mark (The Herald)
Regional meeting on agroecology in Sub-Saharan Africa (FAO)
Decent work in Africa in the post-2015 context: rights and social dialogue for inclusive, sustainable growth (prepared for the ILO’s African Regional Meeting, 30 Nov-3 Dec)
OECD Regulatory Policy Outlook 2015: Policy Brief
Embattled UN climate talks send complex draft text to Paris meet (BioRes)
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This post has been sourced on behalf of tralac and disseminated to enhance trade policy knowledge and debate. It is distributed to over 300 recipients across Africa and internationally, serving in the AU, RECS, national government trade departments and research and development agencies. Your feedback is most welcome. Any suggestions that our recipients might have of items for inclusion are most welcome. Richard Humphries (Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; Twitter: @richardhumphri1)
