Levious Chiukira on Customs and Trade

  Debunking the informality of Cross-Border Trade (CBT) in Southern Africa   The article seeks to debunk the common usage of the word ‘informal’   in relation to cross-border activities carried out by the native Africans across the borders.   the author introduces the need to approach cross-border trade activities from a constructivist view of formality and recognize it as a formal sector. This has been necessitated by continued labels put on this trade despite its positives to the region as a whole. To   Devey & Valoidia   (2009)when studying cross-border trade formality and informality should be viewed as a continuum and not as exclusive dichotomies The CBT involves the movement of the physical movement of not only goods but also people across borders.   Cross-Border Trading has remained an important form of trade in many developing countries. CBT according to studies assisted in the cushioning of the African continent from the global financial...

  The global COVID-19 pandemic is plunging the world into a socioeconomic and financial crisis of an unprecedented scale, in addition to the acute health crisis. The crisis has exposed and exacerbated vulnerabilities and inequalities in both developing and developed countries, deepening poverty and exclusion and pushing the most vulnerable even further behind. The shattering effects have been more visible to the African continent which has consolidated its energies in the creation of an African Economic Community (AEC) prior to the eruption of the pandemic in December 2019 in China.   Africa doesn’t have the luxury of time and cannot follow the traditional path to economic integration. Africa has to abandon the EU linear model of integration and create our own model which is acquainted with the peculiar African challenges. It worth to mention that the integration of Europe happened at the time the world financial systems had the capacity to fund the initiatives and reconst...

  The launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA ) which houses a GDP of USD 2.5 trillion and a population of 1.2 billion people has the been regarded as the answer to African intra-regional trade challenges. The AfCFTA comes at a time where African economies have shown little capacities to transform their economies through trade as there has been little progress on the diversification of exports and value addition to the exports of primary goods manly minerals and agricultural produce. The AfCFTA comes as one of the flagship projects of African Union Agenda 2063. Agenda 2063 is a strategic framework for the socio- economic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years. It builds on, and seeks to accelerate the implementation of past and existing continental initiatives for growth and sustainable development. Key to Agenda 2063 is epitomising sustainable development as a key result of African integration. There are other     key programmes and initi...

Africa has rolled out the African Free Trade Area which has been bestowed with what I assume are high expectations. As I write the AfCFTA is being showered with praises as being historic and going to stimulate and improve the intra-African trade.   I remain pessimistic about AfCFTA and the figures being thrown around as its potential achievements. Protagonists has continued to use statistics quoted in policy papers presented at different conferences and to me most of these figures and targets are out of reach for the AfCFTA and when times comes it will make this project a failure. AfCFTA is comes at a time tariff reductions have failed and nationalism is on the rise as nations are fighting the crippling devastating effects of COVID-19. As the debate of free trade areas rages on without a conclusive stance, what has won is the push for trade liberalism which the forces I shall call the ‘invisible actors’ dominating the discourses and research around the continental free trade area. ...