Journal of African Trade

Volume 8, Issue 1, December 2021, Pages 96 - 108

Rules of Origin across African Regional Trading Agreements: A Landscape with Measures to Address Challenges at Harmonization☆

Authors
Julien Gourdon1, Dzmitry Kniahin2, Jaime de Melo3, *, Mondher Mimouni2
1Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Développement International (CERDI), Université Clermont-Auvergne, CNRS, CERDI, F-63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
2International Trade Centre (ITC), Geneva, Switzerland
3Fondation pour les études et recherches en Développement International (FERDI), Université d’Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France
*Corresponding author. Email: jaime.demelo@unige.ch
Corresponding Author
Jaime de Melo
Received 18 August 2020, Accepted 28 November 2020, Available Online 29 December 2020.
DOI
10.2991/jat.k.201224.001How to use a DOI?
Keywords
AfCFTA; rules of origin; product-specific rules of origin; regime-wide rules of origin; compliance costs
Abstract

To become operational, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) must harmonize Rules of Origin (ROO) across Africa’s Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) along two dimensions: regime-wide rules and product-specific rules. This paper describes and evaluates these ROO across the major multiple-membership PTAs engaged in these harmonization negotiations. These PTAs include: The Agadir Agreement, the Greater Arab Free Trade Area, the Common Market for East and South Africa, the East Africa Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community. To this list we add available regime-wide information on two Free-trade-areas (FTAs): the Tripartite FTA and the AfCFTA. The paper makes three contributions. It provides the first comprehensive description of regime-wide rules (RWR) and productspecific rules (PSR) separately across the main African PTAs. This landscape is built up from the complementary work based on the rules of origin facilitator1 that has categorized the 850 textually distinct PSR across six selected African PTAs. Second, the paper proposes metrics to evaluate differences along three dimensions: (i) wording-based text analysis; (ii) distance measures to indicate regulatory overlap; (iii) ordinal index to measure restrictiveness based of RWR and PSR. Third, it proposes a dashboard for negotiators incorporating the classifications and measures developed in the text along with other indicators.

Copyright
© 2020 African Export-Import Bank. Publishing services by Atlantis Press International B.V.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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Journal
Journal of African Trade
Volume-Issue
8 - 1
Pages
96 - 108
Publication Date
2020/12/29
ISSN (Online)
2214-8523
ISSN (Print)
2214-8515
DOI
10.2991/jat.k.201224.001How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2020 African Export-Import Bank. Publishing services by Atlantis Press International B.V.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Cite this article

TY  - JOUR
AU  - Julien Gourdon
AU  - Dzmitry Kniahin
AU  - Jaime de Melo
AU  - Mondher Mimouni
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/29
TI  - Rules of Origin across African Regional Trading Agreements: A Landscape with Measures to Address Challenges at Harmonization☆
JO  - Journal of African Trade
SP  - 96
EP  - 108
VL  - 8
IS  - 1
SN  - 2214-8523
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/jat.k.201224.001
DO  - 10.2991/jat.k.201224.001
ID  - Gourdon2020
ER  -