Locating African Countries within Mega-Regionals

Abstract

Mega-Regional trade negotiations, specifically the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), have the potential to transform global trade relations, if successfully concluded. They would forge new market access conditions and trading rules amongst the major developed economies in sub-Saharan African space, our core focus. This would redound in the World Trade Organization, to shape global trade rules for the future. If they fail then the decline of western, especially U.S. but also EU, trade leadership will be hastened, benefiting China in particular but also, over time, the BRICs economies. That would give smaller developing countries greater leverage in pursuing their trade relations but with relatively uncertain consequences in a new, multipolar trading system. In this light, our interest is in how African countries are responding to the Mega-Regionals. Are they consciously forming strategic responses in anticipation of potentially being shut out of potential new trade and investment circuits? If so, what is the nature and direction of those responses? If not, why not? And what may the consequences for their trade relations be?.