African Regional Trade Agreements as Flexible Legal Regimes
100 Pages Posted: 9 Jun 2010 Last revised: 2 Mar 2011
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
This paper argues that African Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are flexible legal regimes. As flexible legal regimes, African RTAs provide a forum for cooperation on a whole range of objectives, including trade liberalization. They nestle or nest within these regimes an entire range of other objectives including those relating to security and the sharing of common river ways.
African RTAs have modified the neo-classical/comparative advantage classical free trade model in two significant ways. First, African RTAs have embraced the principle of variable geometry according to which time-tabled liberalization commitments are undertaken at different speeds depending on the economic ability and interest of members. Second, these regimes have made distributional equity amongst themselves a central feature. This means they have designed compensatory mechanisms to ensure losses arising from liberalization commitments are given to the losers. By foregrounding variable geometry and distributional equity concerns, African RTAs have correspondingly distanced themselves from non-discriminatory free trade. In addition, the multiplicity of memberships in African RTAs while further confirming their nature as flexible regimes, also illustrates how they are a classic case of the spaghetti bowl. Thus while flexibility has enmeshed well with the preferences of African governments not to build strong supranational bureaucracies, it has undermined the achievement of more thorough intra-regional trade.
Keywords: Regional Trade Agreements, RTA, Africa
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