Dissemination Workshop on Regional Integration and Trade Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Brief Summary by
K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary, ECA
10-11 October 1996

I want to give my warmest personal thanks to all of you, and on behalf of my colleagues at AERC and ECA, for the quality of your contribution to the dissemination workshop on Regional Integration and Trade Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa during this two-day meeting.

During these days, we have covered wide range of topics on regional integration and trade liberalization.

1. On Regional Integration, the following topics have been discussed:

Establishment and evolution of regional integration arrangements in Africa;

Motivation and objectives; including trade expansion, strengthening of infrastructure as well as enhancement of security and political stability;

Key integration instruments; in particular the design and implementation of common external tariffs as well as compensation arrangements;

Constraints which confronted regional integration arrangements; especially in terms of structural elements such as initial conditions (potential for trade integration and the complementarity of production and trade structure); design problems and implementation constraints;

Performance, when assessed against regional integration objectives, there appears to be wide gap between expectation and actual performance (reality);

Various Pan-African institutions are involved in efforts directed at facilitating the process of integration in Africa such as OAU, ADB and ECA. The perspectives of these institutions were also discussed. Similarly, modalities to enhance implementation of regional integration objectives, such as CBI, were also discussed.

2. Trade Liberalization

The workshop so far has discussed the following topics:

The extent of liberalization: the consensus is that compared to the trade regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, African countries have achieved significant success in liberalizing trade particularly in exchange rate. However, there remains a lot to be done specially in bringing down the level of tariff and non-tariff barriers, compressing the tariff structure and making trade policy more transparent and credible.

The impetus for trade liberalization has been largely through unilateral as embedded in economic reform programmes undertaken at country level. Such unilateral trade liberalization efforts have not been coordinated at general level and have, therefore, missed significant regional dimension.

Scope of trade liberalization: most of trade liberalization efforts have focused on import component of trade. In the context of the emerging focus on outward-orientation of economic development, trade policy should shift towards promoting dynamic export sectors.

3. The way forward:

Opening Africa: Partly through trade liberalization in the context of a development strategy that more closely reflect the African reality;

Linking Africa together through different models of regional integration and cooperation that accommodate different forms of integrations schemes and speech of implementation;

Linking Africa with the world: In recognition of the globalization phenomenon, several mechanisms have been discussed during the sessions including Africa/Europe linkages as well as enhanced African participation in WTO.