Imperative for expediting African Continental Free Trade Area negotiations on e-commerce

Abstract

E-commerce was first included as a topic in a free trade agreement (FTA) in 2001. Since then, the number of FTAs that address e-commerce has been regularly increasing, now representing 30 per cent of all notified trade agreements with WTO. E-commerce is included in virtually all of the recent mega-regional trade agreements, including the concluded Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement. On 10 February 2020, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union: DECIDE[D] that Phase III Negotiations focuses on an AfCFTA Protocol on E-Commerce immediately after conclusion of Phase II Negotiations and DIRECT[ED] the African Union Commission to embark on preparations for the upcoming negotiations and mobilize resources during 2020 for capacity building for African trade negotiators to be involved in the negotiation of e-commerce legal instruments at the level of the African Continental Free Trade Area. This briefing note provides an illustration of the types of issues that can be approached in an African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) protocol on e-commerce. It makes a case for expediting those negotiations – given the considerable changes in the world economy since the thirty-third ordinary session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, held in Addis Ababa on 9 and 10 February 2020 – particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the imperative to build back better for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the value of consolidating a pan-African position on e-commerce negotiating issues, and to better enable coherence with the other protocols of AfCFTA .