Developing Country

In this book, the author took the interdisciplinary approach to explore the application of the FET clause in the IIAs between developed and developing countries as well as its subsequent effects on the socio-economic context of the developing state. The main aim of this book as stated in p. 171 is to re-conceptualize the FET clause from the perspective of the host States with comprehensive consideration of their social, political, and economic conditions.

This paper engages in a critical legal analysis of Professor Ian Taylor’s article, Sixty Years Later: Africa’s Stalled Decolonization. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis but will provide a limited legal perspective of the article’s foundational arguments on the underlying causes of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, through a legal lens rooted in intellectual property (IP) law and international investment law (IIL).

The financial crisis of 2007-9 and the ensuing austerity put the political spotlight on the increasingly evident defects of the international framework for taxation of transnational corporations (TNCs). This attention will be heightened by the current COVID-19 crisis, which has led to even greater levels of state expenditure, including bailouts to business, and will bring an even sharper focus on taxation.

The aim of this piece is to contribute to the evolving debate around the AfCFTA and its relationship with the WTO. It considers whether the practice of African RTAs to rely on the Enabling Clause since 1979 should be replicated. Considering the ambition of the AfCFTA for a deep integration, aiming at liberalising trade in goods, services, investment, intellectual property, competition, etc, the Enabling Clause appears as a second-best option.

The COVID-19 crisis is likely to make countries in the global south accumulate more debt in a global economic environment where repayment of current debt will be difficult. The speech by Thomas Sankara on the morality of debt repayment asks us very difficult questions which humanity must collectively confront if debt crises are to become relics of past economics. The collective inability by the global south to assert itself on negotiating tables and to recreate itself in the aftermath of various global crises has been a sad misuse of crises.

Apart from the challenges presented by the pandemic, governments in developing economies have the current difficulty of providing essential public goods and social services even during normalcy. How quickly economies recover after the crisis may depend on the nature of coping initiatives employed during the pandemic. It is therefore pertinent that governments (especially in the global South) revisit their free zone policy architecture to create a reliable alternative economy with which to stimulate the macro economy especially when the risks associated with sustaining economic activities in the customs territory may be too high.

The structural style of the book is designed to aid easy reference, especially by legal practitioners, judges, lawmakers and policy formulators; to make the book a valuable resource for researchers, academics and students; and an easily comprehensible material for the uninitiated in the field of copyright, privacy and competition law and the operation of multi-sided music platforms. Reading the book from cover to cover, a reader will undoubtedly confirm that the book has achieved this goal.

The book provides illuminating insights on the contrasting historical and economic imperatives that drove the development of competition law and policy in the US, post World War II Europe and in selected countries on the African continent.  The authors explain that in the US, the development of antitrust law was a response to the industrial revolution and in its wake, large enterprises.  For almost a century, the US courts, interpreted antitrust law “to protect the weak from the strong.”  There was a significant shift in US antitrust law under the Reagan administration “away from economic democracy and towards efficiency” as the US focused on global competitiveness and economic power.