AfCFTA

The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law.

In this collaboration between Asser Institute’s Doing Business Right project and AfronomicsLaw, we welcome contributions from scholars working on African international law, African perspectives of international/transnational law, as well as scholars working on business and human rights more generally.

This webinar focused on what possible directions what the ideal paths lie for a US/Kenya Free Trade Agreement that will benefit Kenya in all the areas it is negotiating with the United States. The experts panelists consider what constraints and possibilities the negotiating framework in the United States means for Kenya’s goals in the negotiations. In addition, the experts consider what lessons Kenya can learn from the United States, Mexico and Canada, (USMCA), Free Trade Agreement and how those lessons can translated into positive outcomes for Kenya.

The Namibia Law Journal invites contributions from authors with regard to the impact of Covid-19 on the Namibian society and developed countries, from legal and socio-economic perspectives, regarding the effects that the global pandemic will have on such countries’ developmental aspirations and the realisation of their Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs). 

We write to thank our readers and contributors for a really productive 2019.

The AfCFTA seeks to change the manner in which African states trade with each other. The existence of the AfCFTA is what Roscoe Pound termed using the law as a tool of social engineering. The African Union in creating the AfCFTA intended to promote, facilitate and eventually experience free intra-African trade. This review appreciates the AfCFTA but seeks to criticize a loophole it has created

Fox and Bakhoum’s fairly broad analysis focusing on West, East, and Southern African countries brings to fore the real challenges at play in Africa. It is a fragmented, stratified yet at times vertically united legal and policy landscape. While they observe the need for convergence of competition law at the continental or regional level, they note the different states of developmental progress among sub-Saharan African countries hence concede the need for the fragmented approach

Arguably, Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa does more than take part in this literature, it helps bring it into focus, crystallizing its insights and articulating a number of its internal debates.  Perhaps this assessment should be nuanced a bit.  Despite their extensive footnotes and their admirable collaborative scholarship and drive to work from and with African sources (for instance with the Quarterly Competition Review produced by CCRED), the book is focused more on the policy problem than on the existing literature about the problem.  This is not a book about books; it is a book about identifying a complex economic situation with challenges and opportunities and charting and driving a particular line in favour of a better life for Africa’s population.

The effective implementation of the AfCFTA can only be achieved where state parties are assured of the stability of their local markets. This article notes that one of the key ways to safeguard these markets is through the development of a coordinated response to MFN clauses which can only be effectively attained through the Council of Ministers.