Trade facilitation in North Africa for enhanced regional economic integration: challenges, opportunities and the way forward

Abstract

Over recent years, the issue of trade facilitation has emerged as an important element of multilateral, regional, and bilateral trade debates. The growing importance of this issue has reflected the important structural changes in global production and trade over the last few decades. In particular, the expansion of global value chains as the key channel for organizing global production and trade over the last few decades entailed new requirements to facilitate the movement of parts and components and final goods across national borders. This report provides an analysis of the position of North Africa with regard to the trade facilitation agenda. The discussion is presented at three levels of analysis. The first is the national level, at which a thorough analysis is made of the policies of each North African country in respect of trade facilitation. The second is the regional level, where the focus is placed on initiatives within the North Africa region related to trade facilitation. At a third level, the analysis looks at this regional picture in the context of broader developments in the area of trade facilitation and, in this process, a comprehensive review of developments in this area has been conducted. In addition to multilateral processes, a special focus was given to other regional initiatives in this area with the objective of identifying examples of best practice policies that could be implemented in North Africa. The report is based on a number of sources. An analysis was made of the key policies on trade facilitation and a review conducted of the manner in which trade facilitation is dealt with in different trade agreements. A detailed analysis was also made of trade facilitation in a number of regional blocs. Lastly, a country-by-country analysis was carried out of trade facilitation in North Africa.