The journal article titled The AfCFTA tariff offers: Current state and first revelations about members' stances towards openness and protectionism is available online at this link.
This article significantly updates and extends the earlier JRC PANAP working paper entitled "The AfCFTA Tariff Offers: Current State and First Insights" (link to the paper and link to the news).
Contextually, the dataset underlying the study has been updated in DataM, maintening the availability of both datasets. Dashboard and raw data available here
Title: The AfCFTA tariff offers: Current state and first revelations about members' stances towards openness and protectionism
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/twec.13580
Year: 2024
Authors: Boysen, O
Journal: The World Economy
Abstract: Most signatories of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement have submitted tariff concession offers, as published on the AfCFTA Secretariat's website. Over a year since the AfCFTA came into effect, it is time to take stock of these submissions and assess the data with respect to members' stances towards fostering intra-African trade through openness on the one hand and maintaining protection against competing imports and revenues from import tariffs on the other. Combining the offers with corresponding trade and tariff data, we find that there are both significant data gaps and inconsistencies with the AfCFTA's trade liberalisation modalities and the trade classification standard. Constructing two tariff schedules, one which repairs the offers for compliance with the modalities and another that maximises the import tariff revenue retained as a benchmark, the analysis confirms that the modalities require regions to liberalise strongly, but most opt to liberalise even more and earlier than necessary. Stances towards freer trade, however, differ markedly between regions. Deriving a measure of liberalisation stance from the schedules above and associating it with trade, economic and geographic indicators reveals patterns that suggest potential motivations for the stances of some country groups.
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