The Tripartite Free Trade Area – Patterns of International Trade of Participating Regional Economic Communities

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African Community and the Southern Africa Development Community are three of the eight regional economic communities that are recognized by the African Union as building blocks of the African Economic Community. On June 10th 2015 the three RECs concluded the negotia-tions to establish the tripartite free trade area on a tariff-free, quota-free, exemption-free basis by simply combining their existing free trade are-as. The main benefit to be secured from the grand free trade area is the establishment of a larger market, with a single economic space. The multiplicity of trading arrangements in southern and eastern Africa, ranging from bilateral agreements between individual countries to free trade areas and customs unions, poses a huge implementation challenge to the deepening and development of the process of economic integra-tion thus the creation of the Tripartite free trade area can be regarded as a step in the right direction. The paper aims at assessing the main fea-tures of international trade in the three RECs participating in the negoti-ations on the Tripartite FTA. It presents the aims, principles and main challenges of the Tripartite FTA negotiations. Then it examines thor-oughly the three participating RECs in terms of the trends in their inter-national trade of their member states with a special focus on intra-regional trade. Some conclusions are drawn on the integration potential of the participating RECs as well as on the possibilities presented by the creation of the Tripartite FTA.

Keywords:

Tripartite FTA , Grand FTA , COMESA-EAC-SADC , Regional economic integration , African economy