Analysis

Whatever their level of evolution in competition regulation, developing countries, particularly African countries except for a few rare success stories such as South Africa, need to interrogate their RCRs and national competition laws. Countries without a competition regime or law have the advantage of avoiding the Washington Consensus trap and forging a national competition law tailored to their development goals

The report has been commissioned by Fairtrade Germany and Fairtrade Austria with the purpose to gather food for thought for a policy position of Fairtrade on trade policy by looking critically into presumptions, theories and ideologies and glean some ideas off the mainstream. It is conducted by combining legal expertise in the area of international economic law with the expertise, knowledges, visions, opinions and aspirations of multiple actors who are active in the Fair Trade movement or have been reflecting on how to transform international trade and investment in light of the multiple social and environmental crises. The views expressed in this report do not represent the current thinking or attitudes of Fairtrade and are in the sole responsibility of its authors.

This Symposium is jointly organized by AfronomicsLaw, the Chair of International Relations at the Hochshule für Politik, Technical University of Munich Germany, and the Mandela Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. It builds on a paper written by Prof Tim Büthe and Vellah Kedogo Kigwiru in the inaugural issue of African Journal of International Economic Law, titled 'The Spread of Competition Law and Policy in Africa: A Research Agenda'. The journal article set out a research agenda for better understanding the reality, promise, and limitations of competition law and policy in Africa at the n1ational and regional level. Consequently, this Symposium brings together competition law scholars, practitioners, and competition agencies' bureaucrats across the world to critically and comparatively discuss the reality, promises, and challenges facing the enforcement of specifically regional level competition policies in the Global South.

When the EU and Angola announced the first round of the first-ever ‘Sustainable Investment Facilitation Agreement’, development experts must have asked themselves, like I did, which aspect of this Agreement will induce many foreign firms to plough their capital into the resource-rich Southwestern African nation.

The recent decision by the High Court of Kenya regarding the admission of students from South Sudan advocates of Kenya may not have attracted much attention in Kenya and the East African Community (EAC), but it is all the same a very important one among the many decisions that have been coming from the Kenyan courts recently regarding the implementation of the Treaty Law In Kenya.

Ecuador’s relationship with the Investment Treaty Regime is an unsettled issue deeply contested by dueling actors and narratives battling to annihilate each other. Ecuador is one of the top investment disputes’ respondent. ISDS awards have been particularly detrimental to its public coffers, and the country has attempted a tailored made constitutional approach to limit the reach of ISDS. Yet, none of this has been enough to reach a minimum consensus and understanding regarding the breadth of foreign investment protection. Remarkably, this endless struggle has paved the way for an increasing confluence of players that put in plain display the multiple transnational interests that shape foreign investment protection.

To address the idea of sustainability in the allocation of profits, two aspects are required: on the one hand, there is a need for a sustainability index, and on the other hand, there is a need for standardised sustainability indicators that are determined and published by companies worldwide. For developing countries, this should mean to be a frontrunner in this development and push forward the idea, always keeping in mind the risks but also chances of a sustainability in substance approach.

In this essay I reflect on the question: What do we make of Africa’s States’ sovereignty whose economies have been reordered/structured around imperial relations of domination, whose larger reigns of social coexistence reeks of neoliberalism and whose citizens are always served the short end of the stick in the access or provision of social welfare services? Not to belabour the point, our increasingly datafied lives promising ‘enormous’ economic value require renewed governance, effort and thinking most pertinently from African States lest what we have as statehood is annihilated on the altar of technological imperialism.

This blog post largely derives from a recent study entitled Bank of Zambia’s Autonomy Amidst Political Turnovers in Zambia, which investigated whether BOZ could effectively deliver on its mandate given the context of political interferences arising out of Zambia’s competitive clientelist democracy. That study concluded that, over time, BOZ had enshrined its independence in the law and had been quite effective at delivering on its mandate to stabilize prices and develop the financial system as required in a market economy.

To support safe and stable market functioning, and to mitigate discordance and incompatibility risks, this paper proposes the establishment of a common set of Afro-market-centric foundational principles (“African Core Principles for Systemically Important Payment Systems”, or “Afro-SIPS Principles”) to provide a baseline framework of standards to which all African cross-border payment systems – including systemically important national payment systems – should adhere and incorporate into their applicable rulebooks and risk management frameworks.