I recently attended the World Economic Forum’s annual Africa summit in Abuja, Nigeria. My reflections on it are contained in an opinion editorial published in Business Day newspaper. The piece needs to be read against the backdrop of Nigeria’s much ballyhooed rebasing of its GDP and ascent to the pinnacle of African economic size, but also the much more widely reported depredations of Boko Haram.
One subject much discussed in Abuja was African trade relations, both internally – regional economic integration – and with the outside world. The Business Day piece contains brief reflections on this, but Andreas Freytag and I considered trade relations with Europe in more detail in a recent blog post for Borderlex. We focused on the ill-fated Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations, which are once again subject to an EC deadline of October 1st this year for completion. Borderlex also posted a short review of our recent paper for the ACP Ambassadors in Geneva, wherein we considered the implications of mega-regional trade deals (TTIP and TPP) for the ACP countries.