Actually, the full title of the note is: “Removing Barriers to Trade between Ghana and Nigeria: Strengthening Regional Integration by Implementing ECOWAS Commitments”: This note assesses the challenges that goods exporters within the region face when trying to benefit from the ECOWAS-wide Free Trade Area. It focuses on the experience of 30 exporting companies in… Read More »
Of course they are: A paper from the Centre for the Study of African Economies suggests that savvy Chinese companies have set up shop in Africa as a route to get their products into the US, with the added incentive of all those juicy AGOA benefits. The logic is impeccable. Not only does an Africa platform get… Read More »
Off to Basel tomorrow for an African Borderlands Research Network conference. As part of a panel on a comparative study of cross-border trade networks in Africa, I will be presenting a paper titled “Benin-Nigeria secondhand clothing cross-border trade in historical perspective”. The abstract: Today, Benin Republic is the main supplier of secondhand clothing to Nigeria,… Read More »
Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk… Read More »
This article was originally written for www.tradeinvestnigeria.com. In May, an Indian trade mission, led by Mr. Ravi Bangar, the deputy permanent representative of India to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), paid a visit to Mr. Jubril Martins-Kuye, Nigeria’s Minister for Commerce and Industry. One of the major issues they discussed was the possibility of India… Read More »
… here.
From a BusinessDay Nigeria column: [O]ur trade policy has remained very inconsistent many years after independence. Recent reforms – particularly the NEEDS – have however tried to considerably minimize the unpredictability of the trade policy regime by establishing a schedule to fully adopt the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) common external tariff (CET)… Read More »
Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former minister for finance, and currently a managing director of the World Bank: intra regional trade in Africa remains low and accounts for less than 10% of total trade . Between 1999 and 2006, for example, intra-African trade increased by an average of just 14 per cent per year, while trade… Read More »
The president of Rice Importers and Distributors Association of Nigeria (RIDAN), Gbadamosi Mufutau, urged the federal government to harmonize the duty on rice with the neighbouring countries to discourage smuggling. “You observed that any increase in duty, tariff, levies and benchmark always cause increase of importation of such products to Republic Benin and Togo ports… Read More »
In a group interview in September, 18 disgruntled truck drivers in Cotonou, Benin, vented their frustrations to two Trade Hub consultants: driving freely from Cotonou to Ouagadougou was impossible without harassment, they said. They sometimes spend three days at borders where customs officials hold up paper work when they refuse to pay bribes; meanwhile, their… Read More »