ABSTRACT
The vision of the European Commission (EC) is that these WTO-consistent market access-focused agreements will be a stepping stone to deeper agreements in the future and represent an important move in Africa towards a greater focus on trade and trade liberalization. However, how the second stage of such a process will actually materialize remains to be seen as African countries may well lose the bargaining power domestically to obtain progress on competitiveness issues that came from the market access concessions of the EU (see Chapter 6 by Babarinde and Faber in this volume and Rampa 2007). This chapter elaborates on the issue of why and how EPAs should be designed to be consistent with trade and development strategies that seek to drive growth through effective integration into the global market. A first section highlights the trade challenge that African countries face and makes the point that preferences have not been effective in preventing the substantial decline in world market share of African countries. A second section describes opportunities that the new wave of globalization is opening up to African countries. A third section briefly discusses what this means in terms of a strategy to attain global competitiveness and suggests design features of an EPA that would complement and support competitiveness reform programmes.
