Kenya and the US, in February 2020 jointly announced their intent to initiate negotiations on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between themselves. Towards this end, the Ministry of Industrialization, Trade and Enterprise Development having consulted and heard from from various stakeholders developed Negotiating Objectives and Principles to guide the negotiations for this first bilateral FTA between Kenya and the US. This is now made available for public review.

E-commerce has grown rapidly in Kenya, supported by laws governing information and communications technology (ICT) services, e-commerce transactions, data protection and access to information. The government has established one-stop shops for the provision of government services to citizens and for trade logistics. The country is well positioned to expand its digital trade with the establishment of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), given the policies outlined in the government’s Digital Economy Blueprint.

Globalisation has become an unavoidable incidence with almost every country involved in some new form of economic integration arrangement. In Africa, the largest trade agreement, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) was recently signed in order to boost intra-trade and to increase not only economic welfare, but also living standards. However, when such trade arrangements occur, some economic sectors are likely to gain while others shrink due to changes in trade dynamics. The effects are structural changes within the economy of the respective countries.

One of the most compelling arguments for regional trade and integration in Africa is that the African market is the most fragmented in the world, with only 16% of trade being within the continent. Furthermore, with 14 regional economic communities (RECs), the scale of integrated trading compared to the magnitude of trade is cause for concern. Africa could soon witness an important milestone on its path towards increased regional trade and improved integration with the implementation of the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (TFTA) involving 26 countries.

The paper employed the augmented gravity model to determine the trade creation and trade diversion effects of economic integration. Results indicate that the income importing country was significant at the 1% level, while the exporting one was weakly significant at the 10% level. Weighted distance was negative and significant at the 1% level. Of the country idiosyncratic factors, language was insignificant and shared border was significantly positive, while landlocked was significantly negative at 1%.

Although currently limited, services trade holds great potential for Bangladesh, as services already make a major contribution to GDP and employment. Services represent an important alternative (in the longer term) or complement (in the shorter term) to ready-made garments (RMGs), which have long dominated Bangladesh’s export mix. The country is poised to see declining RMG export revenues when the country graduates out of least developed country (LDC) status and loses its trade preferences in global markets.

This paper aims to investigate Thailand’s export potentials in the ASEAN+6 countries, due to a “full liberalization and accessibility scenario” within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The methodology used is that of “filtering” statistical country data on macro-economic performance and imports following the Decision Support Model (DSM). The macro-economic data used are from the World Bank and the countries’ imports data are from the 2017 CEPII BACI data set. The export potentials thus identified are the base line in the further analysis.

A casual look at Europe’s and Africa’s experiences of integration suggests that they share certain similarities. They have also adopted a number of similar institutions and policy frameworks, and both regions have set for themselves the ambitious target of creating economic communities for their respective regions. They, however, have followed different historical trajectories of integration, which challenges the notion that the similarities in their adopted institutions of integration could be an attempt by the African Union (AU) to mimic the European Union (EU) integration experience.

This paper was presented jointly by Wilma Viviers and Leila Baghdadi.