Conclusion

Regional trade agreements raise high aspirations and expectations for countries. First, regional trade agreements are supposed to increase trade volumes among member states by removing trade barriers. Second, they are also expected to form building blocks for larger multilateral trade organizations. Third, geographic proximity, similarity in culture, and political history among member states should lead to effective regional trade agreements. Fourth, regional trade agreements are also supposed to lead to convergence in economic well-being of member states. The AfCFTA was established to attain these benefits and much more, yet, the single most important finding of this study is that Africa’s regional trade agreements that have been selected to be founding blocks of the AfCFTA have not lived up to their expectations of promoting intraregional trade in Africa. Only Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania had lower intraregional export trade, and only Oceania had a lower intraregional import trade than Africa. With respect to the individual RTAs, only the EAC and SADC had more than 10% of their export trade occurring within them in 2019, and only SADC had intraregional trade registering 19.9%. The rest were all under 10%. Contrast this with ASEAN’s 22.8% of its export trade and 21.8% of its import trade in 2019. This is a problem if these RTAs are supposed to be the foundation blocks for the AfCFTA. The problem is even more serious if one considers the fact that oldest of these RTAs (ECOWAS) has been in existence for 48 years and the youngest (COMESA) for 25 years old. Proposed AfCFTA and all its expectations. Reasons identified for this include lack of political will, overlapping membership, prolonged political and social unrest, the presence or absence of hegemonic members of RTAs, and the role of external influences. However, the most important cause of low intraregional trade among Africa’s pre-AfCFTA RTAs is the lack of economic complementarity and competitiveness of African countries that have removed all the incentives and rationale to pursue intraregional trade. In particular, African economies are mostly dependent on entities that are outside the continent in the sense that they produce primary commodities that they are not able to convert to value-added goods through manufacturing, while they consume manufactured products most of which they do not produce. To boost intraregional trade, African countries must industrialize.