Since November 2014, we have been assisting the Union of Comoros in its WTO accession negotiations, in a project funded by DFID's Trade Advocacy Fund. The accession process is still at a relatively early stage; the latest milestone being the submission of the Memorandum on the Foreign Trade Regime to the WTO in July 2013.
In recent years, the increasing recognition of the developmental role of the private sector, the additional demands being made for support to the sector, the withdrawal of support to the Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and the need to ensure more coherence in its PSD programming has led the ACP to decide on the formulation of an overall PSD strategy for the Group.
We support the operationalization of the ACP Private Sector Development Strategy by providing expertise and logistical support for an in-depth consultation across the ACP regions and the organisation of a high level Symposium.
The Symposium website provides detailed information - including the draft Strategy.
Evaluating the impact of international trade agreements has always been an arduous task, requiring specialist skills in economic research and modelling. However, the proclivity of modern trade diplomacy to delve deeply behind national borders into complex issues of domestic regulation and the ever expanding substantive remit of trade agreements greatly enhance the need for informed impact assessment and a refinement of the quantitative and qualitative metrics used to this end. Responding to this need, DFID’s Trade Advocacy Fund has just concluded a Framework Agreement with a consortium of BKP Development (lead firm), DNA Economics, and the World Trade Institute at the University of Bern.
The National Business Agenda developed by us on behalf of the Ethiopian Public-Private Consultative Forum has just been presented by the Ethiopian Chamber of Commerce and Sectoral Associations (ECCSA) to Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and the Cabinet. See the press coverage in Addis Fortune, or download a copy of the article.
Update 25 July 2014: The NBA continues to influence public-private dialogue, specifically in the area of easing access to finance, as explained in this article in Addis Fortune of 20 July 2014.
While rules of origin (ROOs) constitute an essential element of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), recent analysis of the utilization of preferences shows that even with liberal ROOs, utilization of preferences is often low, especially by smaller exporters. To overcome the negative implications of ROOs, we propose a way to increase the welfare benefits from PTAs while also providing a stronger impetus to the integration of SMEs into regional trade than would be possible under even the most favourable ROOs regime currently in use: the presumption of origin. It involves a presumption of compliance with ROOs for smaller commercial-scale shipments accompanied by a simple good faith attestation of origin, with use of anti-circumvention measures modelled on similar provisions in anti-dumping and countervailing duty law to address complaints and/or to investigate suspicious import surges.