The EU, Africa and economic partnership agreements:Unintended consequences of policy leverage. Christopher Stevens

Résumé du document

This article argues that Economic Partnership Agreements will hinder the process of regional integration in Africa as African countries may be encouraged to reinforce rather than eliminate barriers to the free circulation of goods between them, because of the choices they make in the details of their trade regimes with Europe. Since 1975, all of Sub-Saharan Africa benefits from a very favorable trade regime through the Lomé Conventions and, since 2000, the Cotonou Agreement. These agreements are due to be replaced in 2007 by EPAs which fulfill the requirements of the WTO for Free Trade Agreements. For a very long time, WTO member states, discriminated by the privileges granted to the ACP group, let the EU have such policies but they now challenge the EU's preference agreements. The WTO allows members who are creating an FTA or customs union to discriminate in favor of their partners and against outsiders, provided that EPAs result in the liberalization of 'substantially all' trade and that it is accomplished in a 'reasonable length of time'.

Extraits

[...] The EU's initiative could have one of four effects, the latter being the most likely. - It might provide the pressure to accelerate the leisurely pace of CU/FTA formation in Africa and force countries to choose between incompatible groups when they belong to more than one. - It may, by contrast, reinforce internal barriers between countries even whilst they liberalize towards the EU. - No SSA state ( or, at least, none in one or more of the regions ) might join the EPA. [...]

[...] The WTO allows members that are creating an FTA or customs union ( CU ) to discriminate in favor of their partners and against outsiders, provided that EPAs result in the liberalization of “substantially trade and that it is accomplished in a “reasonable length of time”. The requirements are vague but the EU understands them as follow: the ACP will be able to exclude from any liberalization a basket of goods that accounts for around 20% of the value of their imports at present from the EU and will have 12 years to complete the process. [...]

[...] - This potential will be realized in the case of goods that have a unit value of over per ton. Focusing on Eastern and Southern Africa According to research work done for this article, a potential problem exists of dissimilar liberalization schedules making regional partners reluctant to open their borders to trade with each other. Two groups of goods may prove to be less problematic candidates for harmonization than they appear at present. One is of products for which tariffs are probably levied for revenue raising rather than protectionist purposes. [...]

[...] Second, as the EPAs are implemented they may provide new reasons not to remove intra-regional border controls. If countries' liberalization schedules are not harmonized, they will have a new incentive to keep rigorous border controls and there is a high chance that some goods will be shipped in country A through the borders of a country B that has lower tariffs on EU imports. How to capture the scale of the challenge? One needs to make five assumptions to create a picture of the likely scale of the problem. [...]