The regulation on trade barriers under SADC and EAC: assessing the effectiveness of their legal framework

There are more regional integration initiatives in Eastern and Southern Africa than anywhere else in Sub-Sahara Africa. These include Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), East Africa Community (EAC), Southern African Development Community (SADC), Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) and Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Owing to the scope of this study, only the trade liberalization initiatives under SADC and EAC will be evaluated. The trade liberalization strategies will focus on the intra-regional level. This study entails a comparative study of key legal provisions facilitating elimination of trade barriers within SADC and EAC trade blocs respectively. The study identifies the underlying objectives that inspired the countries to enter the said regional trade agreements. It will focus on the mechanisms adopted to liberalize free movement of goods in the SADC Free Trade Area and the EAC Customs Union respectively. Since both RTAs carry a firm commitment to take affirmative measures to reduce barriers to intra-regional trade, the respective trade agreements should contain a legal framework that will drive the trade liberalization objectives. The study seeks to determine whether the legal frameworks in the SADC and EAC trade regimes is a viable tool to eliminate trade barriers and in turn foster a deeper level of integration. The aim of the study is to ascertain whether their constitutive legal framework is effective enough to achieve this goal. The study concludes that while the SADC FTA and the EAC custom union have already been launched, the levels of intra-regional trade remains low. This is caused by failure of some member states to meet their commitments to eliminate tariff barriers, the surge of non-tarifff barriers and multiple memberships of SADC and EAC members with other regional trade blocs. This study is founded on the belief that lack of enforcement of community law at national and community level is slowing down the implementation of treaty commitments.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Commercial Law

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Kamau, Nancy Washinga

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nkomo, Marumo

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12898

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/12898