This informative book examines the intellectual property (IP) provisions of the sub-regional and continental Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that have been implemented in Africa to facilitate trade and promote economic integration. Michael Blakeney and Getachew Mengistie Alemu explain how FTAs can be used when setting IP standards in order to influence the ongoing effort to develop effective international agreements with Africa.
Deep trade agreements (DTAs) cover not just trade but additional policy areas, such as international flows of investment and labor and the protection of intellectual property rights and the environment. Their goal is integration beyond trade or deep integration. These agreements matter for economic development. Their rules influence how countries (and hence, the people and firms that live and operate within them) transact, invest, work, and ultimately, develop. Trade and investment regimes determine the extent of economic integration, competition rules affect economic efficiency, intellectual property rights matter for innovation, and environmental and labor rules contribute to environmental and social outcomes. This Handbook provides the tools and data needed to analyze these new dimensions of integration and to assess the content and consequences of DTAs. The Handbook and the accompanying database are the result of collaboration between experts in different policy areas from academia and other international organizations, including the International Trade Centre (ITC), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and World Trade Organization (WTO).
Political momentum towards Africa-wide free trade has been intensifying. In March 2018, over 40 countries signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement. Once fully implemented, the AfCFTA is expected to cover all 55 African countries, with a combined GDP of about US$2.2 trillion. This SDN takes stock of recent trade developments in Sub-Saharan Africa and assesses the potential benefits and costs of the AfCFTA, as well as challenges to its successful implementation. In addition to increased trade flows both in existing and new products, the AfCFTA has the potential to generate substantial economic benefits for African countries. These benefits include higher income arising from increased efficiency and productivity from improved resource allocation, higher cross-border investment flows, and technology transfers. Besides lowering import tariffs, to ensure these benefits, African countries will need reduce other trade barriers by making more efficient their customs procedures, reducing their wide infrastructure gaps, and improving their business climates. At the same time, policy measures should be taken to mitigate the differential impact of trade liberalization on certain groups as resources are reallocated in the economy and activities migrate to locations with comparatively lower costs.
Providing the first book-length analysis of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), this volume asks how can it be ensured that the AfCFTA is effectively implemented to deliver inclusive trade in Africa. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will cover an African market of 1.2 billion people and GDP of over $2.5 trillion, across all 55 member States of the African Union. Yet, trade policy increasingly appreciates that free trade is not enough; trade must also be inclusive to deliver developmental benefits. With contributions from leading trade policy authors across Africa and beyond, this book offers insights into the development and implementation of the AfCFTA and serves as a reference for stakeholders interested in trade in Africa more broadly. The contributors assess what important lessons can be drawn from the experiences of regional integration in and beyond Africa, including from success stories like ASEAN as well as from failures like the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. An important new work for researchers and policymakers focusing on African trade and economic policy, and trade policy more generally.
The publication contains an explanation of Most Favored Nation (MFN) treatment and some of the key issues that arise in its negotiation, particularly the scope and application of MFN treatment to the liberalization and protection of foreign investors in recent treaty practice. The paper provides policy options as regards the traditional application of MFN treatment and identifies reactions by States to the unexpected broad use of MFN treatment, and provides several drafting options, such as specifying or narrowing down the scope of application of MFN treatment to certain types of activities, clarifying the nature of "treatment" under the IIA, clarifying the comparison that an arbitral tribunal needs to undertake as well as a qualification of the comparison "in like circumstances" or excluding its use in investor-State cases.
The history of patent harmonization is a story of dynamic actors, whose interactions with established structures shaped the patent regime. From the inception of the trade regime to include intellectual property (IP) rights to the present, this book documents the role of different sets of actors – states, transnational business corporations, or civil society groups – and their influence on the structures – such as national and international agreements, organizations, and private entities – that have caused changes to healthcare and access to medication. Presenting the debates over patents, trade, and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), as it galvanized non-state and nonbusiness actors, the book highlights how an alternative framing and understanding of pharmaceutical patent rights emerged: as a public issue, instead of a trade or IP issue. The book thus offers an important analysis of the legal and political dynamics through which the contest for access to lifesaving medication has been, and will continue to be, fought. In addition to academics working in the areas of international law, development, and public health, this book will also be of interest to policy makers, state actors, and others with relevant concerns working in nongovernmental and international organizations.
The Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open A.I.R.) project focused on the intersection of innovation, intellectual property (IP), and development in Africa and this book offers its research findings. Its case studies cover nine African countries--Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa--looking at IP rights in a range of sites of innovation: agricultural production, biofuel technology, traditional medicine, research collaboration, automotive manufacturing, music production, and scholarly publishing.
This book is highly topical. The shift from the multilateral WTO negotiations to bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements has been going on for some time, but it is bound to accelerate after the WTO Doha round of negotiations is now widely regarded as a failure. However, there is a particular regional angle to this topic as well. After concluding that further progress in the Doha round was unlikely, Pacific Rim nations recently have progressed with the negotiations of a greatly expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement that includes industrialised economies and developed countries such as the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies such as Singapore, but also several developing countries in Asia and Latin America such as Malaysia and Vietnam. US and EU led efforts to conclude FTAs with Asia-Pacific nations are also bound to accelerate again, after a temporary slowdown in the negotiations following the change of government in the United States and the expiry of the US President’s fast-track negotiation authority. The book will provide an assessment of these dynamics in the world’s fastest growing region. It will look at the IP chapters from a legal perspective, but also put the developments into a socio-economic and political context. Many agreements in fact are concluded because of this context rather than for purely economic reasons or to achieve progress in fields like IP law. The structure of the book follows an outline that groups countries into interest alliances according to their respective IP priorities. This ranges from the driving forces of the EU, US and Japan, via Asia-Pacific resource-rich but IP poor economies such as Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies with strong IP systems such as Singapore and Korea to leading developing countries such as China and India and ‘second tier industrializing economies’ such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
This publication displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least.
