Assessing Africa?s Two Billion Populated Market by 2063: The Facts and Fallacies of a Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA)

Abstract

This paper analyses the continuous efforts made by African Heads of States and Governments of the African Union (AU) in promoting the AU Agenda 2063 in seeking to harness the continent's comparative advantages on its youthful population, emerging middle-class consumers, rich natural resources and young labor force capable of transforming Africa in the next 50 years. The undeniable benefits of inter and intra-African trade, trade facilitation, the gradual dismantling of tariff barriers across African borders and their sensitive impacts on national sovereignty and a multiple of geopolitical regional trade arrangements shall be reviewed in this paper in an effort to address current challenges hindering Africa's regional integration and sustainable development.

Targeting untapped intra-regional trade opportunities for trade integration in Africa

“…Figure 4 provides a summary of the welfare changes in the top five performing countries and/or regions, while Figure 5 provides the same data for the countries/regions not ranked among the top five. Although positive gains are probable, these gains are expected to be distributed unequally among the countries and regions because of the different sizes of their economies, levels of export diversification, infrastructure and tariff revenue losses (Tanyi 2015).…”